Brenda Maddox

Who is Brenda Maddox?

Brenda Maddox, Lady Maddox FRSL is an American author, journalist, and biographer, who has lived in the UK since 1959.

Born in Brockton, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, she graduated from Harvard University with a degree in English literature and also studied at the London School of Economics. She is a book reviewer for The Observer, The Times, New Statesman, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and regularly contributes to BBC Radio 4 as a critic and commentator. Her biographies of Elizabeth Taylor, D. H. Lawrence, Nora Joyce, W. B. Yeats and Rosalind Franklin have been widely acclaimed. She has won the Los Angeles Times Biography Award, the Silver PEN Award, the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, and the Whitbread Biography Prize.

She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.

Maddox lives in London and spends time at her cottage near Brecon, Wales where she and her late husband, Sir John Maddox, were actively involved within the local community. She is vice-president of the Hay-on-Wye Festival of Literature, member of the Editorial Board of British Journalism Review, and a past chairman of the Broadcasting Press Guild. Maddox has two children and two stepchildren.