 Bigsby at the Writers' Centre Norwich in 2011 | |
| Born | Christopher William Edgar Bigsby 27 June 1941 Dundee, Scotland |
| Alma mater | Kansas State University University of Sheffield (BA) University of Sheffield (MA) University of Nottingham (PhD) |
| Occupation(s) | Academic, novelist |
Christopher William Edgar Bigsby FRSA FRSL, (born 27 June 1941) is a British literary analyst and novelist, with more than sixty books to his credit. Earlier in his writing career, his books were published under the name C. W. E. Bigsby. He has won awards for his work on the American theatre, for his biography of Arthur Miller, for his first novel, Hester, and for his work in study abroad. He holds honorary degrees from Bolton University and the Complutense University of Madrid.
Bigsby was educated at Sutton County Grammar School and thence at the University of Sheffield, for his BA (1959–1962) and MA (1962–64), before moving to the University of Nottingham for his PhD (1964–66). His first appointment as an American Literature lecturer was at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. In 1969, he moved to the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich rising to Professor of American Studies in 1985, a post he held until retiring in 2018, thence becoming emeritus professor.
He travelled widely for the British Council and chaired their Cambridge Seminar for eighteen years, an event which brought writers and academics from around the world to meet with British writers. He has been a contributor to BBC Radio, presenting many programmes over the years. Besides his many academic books he collaborated with his friend and colleague Malcolm Bradbury on two television plays and an 8-part situation comedy, Patterson. They were also joint editors of the multi-volume Contemporary Writers series for Methuen.
Bigsby has written extensively on American theatre, and in particular has published widely on the playwright Arthur Miller. His books on Miller include, Arthur Miller & Company (1990), The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller (1997), Arthur Miller: A Critical Study (2005), and Remembering Arthur Miller (2005). In November 2008, Bigsby published the first volume of his biography of Miller, based on boxes of papers Miller made available to him before he died in 2005, as well as countless interviews and conversations during a friendship with the playwright that lasted over three decades. The second volume appeared three years later. The biography was serialised in The Daily Telegraph and was Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4.
His work has ranged widely from a study of African-American writers, The Second Black Renaissance, to a work inspired by the work of his colleague W. G. Sebald: Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory, a meditative study on memory and on the ways in which memory has operated in the work of writers for whom the Holocaust was a defining event. The book includes essays on Jean Améry, Tadeusz Borowski, Anne Frank, Rolf Hochhuth, Primo Levi, Arthur Miller, W. G. Sebald, Elie Wiesel and Peter Weiss.
Bigsby has written about Dada and Surrealism, British playwrights and popular culture but remains best known for his work on the American theatre, his three-volume Introduction to Twentieth Century American Drama becoming a standard work. He followed this with Modern American Drama and Contemporary American Playwrights. Individual studies included Joe Orton, Edward Albee, David Mamet and Neil LaBute. He has published a study of American television drama, Viewing America: Twenty-First Century Television Drama and three volumes on American playwrights who have emerged since 2000, Twenty-First Century American Playwrights (2018), Staging America: 21st Century Dramatists (2020), and American Dramatists in the 21st Century: Opening Doors (2023).
Bigsby was the founder director of the Arthur Miller Centre (now Institute) for American Studies at the University of East Anglia whose International Literary Festival he has presented for twenty-eight years, and from which seven volumes of edited interviews have been published as the "Writers in Conversation" series. The Miller Institute was a founder member of the American Studies Network. He was also the founder director of the British Archive for Contemporary Writing until 2018.
