Fellowship / Fellows

Benjamin Markovits

  • 2008–2009
  • Fiction & Poetry
  • Constance E. Smith Fellow
  • Royal Holloway, University of London (United Kingdom)
Headshot of Benjamin Markovits
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Benjamin Markovits lectures in creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of four novels, including two volumes of a projected trilogy about Lord Byron. In Imposture (W. W. Norton, 2007), Markovits took on the story of Byron’s doctor, John Polidori. The second installment, A Quiet Adjustment (W. W. Norton, 2008), is about Byron’s wife.

Markovits’s work describes the moments in people’s lives when they decide whether or not the place they have made for themselves in the world can adequately express who they are. Byron put himself so vividly at the heart of his own world that he serves as a useful foil for the satellite figures around him. The trilogy has been conceived as a series of orbits around a central figure rather than a single trajectory. In the final book, “Childish Love,” which Markovits plans to research and begin in the course of his fellowship, Byron himself will move center stage.

Markovits studied literature at Yale University and the University of Oxford. He has been a professional basketball player, a high school teacher, an editor, and a freelance writer. His work has appeared in the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the New Statesman, the New York Times, Prospect, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. His second novel, Either Side of Winter (Faber and Faber, 2005), was short-listed for Le Prince Maurice Prize. He has been named one of the fifty most influential Americans living in London.

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