Vesna Goldsworthy

Professor Vesna Goldsworthy is a novelist, memoirist and poet with many years' experience in teaching creative writing and English literature. She came to academia after a career at the BBC and she still produces and presents radio and TV programmes internationally.

Her first novel Gorsky (2015) was the New York Times Editor's Choice and Waterstones Book of the Month, as well as being long-listed for the Baileys Prize and serialised as Book at Bedtime on BBC Radio Four. It has been translated into fifteen languages. Her second, Monsieur Ka (2018) was one of the Times' 'Summer Reads' choice of best new novels.

Her internationally best-selling memoir Chernobyl Strawberries (2005) was serialised in the Times and read by Goldsworthy herself as Book of the Week on Radio Four. The Crashaw Prize-winning poetry collection The Angel of Salonika (2011) was one of the Times Best Poetry Books of the Year, described by J.M. Coetzee as a 'welcome new voice in British poetry'.

Goldsworthy's Inventing Ruritania: the Imperialism of the Imagination (1998) is recognised as one of the key contributions to the study of Balkan and European identity. Described by Slavoj Zizek as an 'extraordinary book', and by the Washington Post as containing 'enough research to found an academic department', Ruritania is a much translated volume which continues to be taught at universities worldwide.

Media and public facing roles

Private Passions (2017) with Michael Berkeley was repeated twice by popular demand and has been in the top ten most downloaded podcasts of this BBC Radio Three programme since first broadcast.

Scripted and produced an episode of Something Understood for Radio Four entitled "Finding your Voice in a Foreign Country", broadcast in November 2020

Gave an hour-long interview to Eleanor Wachtel's legendary Writers & Company on CBC, broadcast in February 2019 - Vesna Goldsworthy on re-imagining The Great Gatsby and Anna Karenina | CBC Radio

Judged the European Bank Literature Prize 2020