George Steiner, Biographical Sketch

Biography

Professor George Steiner was born in Paris on 23 April 1929. His family moved to the United States in 1940 and he was educated at the Universities of Paris, Chicago, Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge. He was a member of the editorial staff at The Economist in London during the 1950s before beginning an academic career as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University in 1956. He was appointed Gauss Lecturer at Princeton in 1959. He has been a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, since 1961 and was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva between 1974 and 1994.

Professor Steiner has held visiting professorships at Yale, New York University, the University of Geneva and Oxford University. He is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary fellow of Balliol College Oxford, and has been awarded the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur by the French Government and the King Albert Medal by the Royal Belgian Academy. He received the Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature in 1998 and in the same year was elected Fellow of the British Academy.

He is currently Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University and Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College at Cambridge University.

His non-fiction includes Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1958), a critical analysis of the two great masters of the Russian novel, The Death of Tragedy (1961), In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (1971) and No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-96 (1996). His book on translation, After Babel (1975), was televised in 1977 as The Tongues of Men. He is also the author of a number of works of fiction including Proofs and Three Parables (1992) and The Portage to San Cristobal of AH (1981), which was adapted for the stage by Christopher Hampton. A volume of autobiography, Errata: an Examined Life, was published in 1997. Grammars of Creation (2001) discusses a range of subjects from cosmology to poetry.

He is a regular contributor of reviews and articles to journals and newspapers including the New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian.

Professor Steiner lives in Cambridge, England. His latest book is one of memoir, My Unwritten Books (2008).

In Bluebeard's Castle by George Steiner, 1971