Graham Robb

Graham Macdonald Robb FRSL (born 2 June 1958, Manchester) is a British author and critic specializing in French literature. Born in Manchester, Robb attended the Royal Grammar School, Worcester, before going up to Exeter College, Oxford, to read Modern Languages and graduating with first-class honors in 1981 (BA (Oxon) proceeding MA). 

In 1982, Robb entered Goldsmiths' College, London, to undertake teacher training before pursuing postgraduate studies at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, where he received a Ph.D. in French literature. He was then awarded a junior research fellowship at Exeter College in the University of Oxford (1987–1990) before leaving academia.

Robb won the 1997 Whitbread Best Biography Award for Victor Hugo and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Rimbaud in 2001. Unlocking Mallarmé won the Modern Language Association Prize for Independent Scholars in 1996. All three of his biographies (Victor Hugo, Rimbaud, and Balzac) became The New York Times "Best Books of the Year." The Discovery of France by Robb won the Duff Cooper Prize in 2007 and the RSL Ondaatje Prize in 2008. 

In The Discovery of Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts (2013), he ventures that the ancient Celts organized their territories, determined the locations of settlements and battles, and set the trajectories of tribal migrations by establishing a network of solstice lines based on an extension of the Greek system of climate; as evidence, he presented artistic geometries, road surveying, centurions, and other archaeologically attested pre-Roman alignments.

Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1998, Dr. Robb was appointed a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2009. Following the publication of his French translation of Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris, he was awarded the Medal of the City of Paris in 2012. He and fellow academic Margaret Hambrick married in 1986.