About Richard Beard

Richard Beard’s novels include Lazarus is Dead, Dry Bones and Damascus, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Acts of the Assassins was shortlisted for the UK Goldsmiths Prize, for novels that ‘extend the possibilities of the novel form’.

Beard’s works of narrative non-fiction include his memoir The Day That Went Missing, a US National Book Critics Circle finalist and winner of the 2018 PEN Ackerley Award for literary autobiography. His most recent memoir, Sad Little Men, was a #11 UK Sunday Times Bestseller

His short stories, feature articles, opinion pieces and reviews have appeared in the Guardian, the Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the Financial Times, Prospect, New Statesman, Byline Times and The Nightwatchman.

He studied at Cambridge, at the Open University, and with Malcolm Bradbury on the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia. He has worked as a P.E. teacher, as Secretary to Mathilda, Duchess of Argyll and as an employee at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In the Mendip Hills he and his family looked after Brookleaze, a house owned by the Royal Society of Literature, before moving to Japan for three years as Professor of British Studies at the University of Tokyo.

Formerly Director of The National Academy of Writing in London, he has held further visiting teaching posts in Tokyo and at UEA. In 2017 he was a juror for Canada’s Scotiabank Giller Prize and in the UK has judged the Costa Short Story Award and the BBC National Short Story Award. In 2023 he was the Briena Staunton Visiting Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin.