Ros Barber

• Name — Ros Barber • Born — 1964 • Occupation — Novelist, poet, academic • Notable Work — The Marlowe Papers • Awards — Desmond Elliott Prize, Authors' Club Best First Novel Award, Hoffman Prize • Website — rosbarber.com

She has a BSc in Biology, an MA in creative writing, the arts and education, and a PhD in English literature, all from the University of Sussex. Her PhD was completed in 2011 with a dissertation titled Writing Marlowe as writing Shakespeare. She also has an Open University BA in English literature and philosophy. Barber has worked as a computer programmer.

Barber's first novel, The Marlowe Papers (2012), is written in blank verse and was part of a PhD. She subscribes to the Marlovian theory of Shakespeare authorship, and is as of 2023 a director of research of the Shakespearean Authorship Trust. In 2013, she described herself as an "agnostic" on Marlowe as Shakespeare. In the book, Marlowe's death is a ruse and he writes plays in Shakespeare's name. The book won the Hoffman Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Authors' Club First Novel Award. Her second novel, Devotion (2015), was shortlisted for the Encore Award. Together with Nicola Haydn, she wrote a one-man stage adaptation of The Marlowe Papers performed in 2016.

Of Barber's three volumes of poetry, Material (2008) was a Poetry Book Society recommendation. Its title poem, which also appears in the Faber anthology Poems of the Decade (2015), was in England's school sixth-form syllabus as of 2017.

As of 2021, Barber lectures in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her appointment ended in 2024.

• The Marlowe Papers (2012) • Devotion (2015)

• How Things Are on Thursday (2004) • Not the Usual Grasses Singing (2005) • Material (2008)

• 30 Second Shakespeare (2015)

Barber's parents, who were physicists, divorced when she was young. A brother of hers died of cancer. Barber's first marriage ended in her mid-thirties. She later remarried.