Lisa Appignanesi

Lisa Appignanesi (born Elżbieta Borensztejn; 4 January 1946) is a Polish-born British-Canadian writer, novelist, and campaigner for free expression.

Until 2021, she was the Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, and is a former President of English PEN and Chair of the Freud Museum London.

Appignanesi was born Elżbieta Borensztejn on 4 January 1946 in Łódź, Poland, the daughter of Hena and Aaron Borensztejn.

Following her birth, her parents moved to Paris, France, and in 1951 emigrated to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where she grew up.

She studied at McGill University in Montreal, where she was a features editor for The McGill Daily.

In 1966, she earned her BA and in 1967 her MA degree (with a thesis on Edgar Allan Poe) and married writer Richard Appignanesi.

After their marriage the couple moved to England, where she obtained a DPhil degree in Comparative Literature at the University of Sussex in 1970.

During this period she spent some time in Paris and Vienna, and wrote the thesis that became the book Proust, Musil and Henry James: femininity and the creative imagination, which was published in 1974.

In 1975 she published The Cabaret, a history of cabaret, a new edition of which came out in 2005 (Yale University Press).

She then lectured at New England College and in 1976 was one of the founders of the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, which included Richard Appignanesi, John Berger and Arnold Wesker and launched the graphic Beginners series with titles on Marx and Freud.

In 1980 Appignanesi left academia to become Director of Talks and Seminars at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, where she stayed for ten years and helped the ICA talks programme gain a reputation as "an intellectual hothouse".

While at the ICA she edited the Documents series, which included the books Postmodernism and Ideas from France.

The couple had one son, film director Josh Appignanesi; they separated in 1981 and divorced in 1984.

Her later partner, then husband, was John Forrester, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge, with whom she wrote Freud's Women.

The couple's daughter, Katrina Forrester, is an assistant professor of Government and Social Studies at Harvard University.

Lisa Appignanesi lives in London.

After a year working as a writer in a Manhattan social research firm, Appignanesi returned to Britain to work as a European Studies lecturer at the University of Essex.

She became deputy director of the ICA in 1986 and created the ICA-Television branch, which produced England's Henry Moore in 1988 and Seductions for Channel Four.

She left the ICA in 1990 to write full-time.

In 1991 Appignanesi published a best-selling novel, Memory and Desire.

A major study of Freud's life, ideas and his relations to women, Freud's Women (co-written with John Forrester) was published in 1992.

As well as these she has written several other works of fiction, including thrillers.

She worked as a fellow of the Brain and Behaviour Laboratory at the Open University, was a council-member of the ICA (2000–06) and was Chair of the Freud Museum, London from 2008 to 2014.

She has also written for The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, and The Daily Telegraph and The New York Review of Books.

She is a former member of the Board of IMPRESS Project, the independent monitor for the UK Press.

In 2004 she became the Deputy President of English PEN and then President (2008–11).

As part of her work with English PEN she edited Free Expression is No Offence, a collection of writings that formed part of English PEN's protest against what became the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 and helped induce the British Government to amend the bill by inserting a robust clause protecting freedom of expression.

Under her presidency, English PEN launched its report on Libel Reform, "Free Speech is Not for Sale", helped to rid Britain of obsolete Blasphemy and Criminal Libel laws, as well as setting up the PEN PINTER PRIZE.

Appignanesi was also voted one of Britain's Top 101 female public intellectuals.

Appignanesi has been nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize, and the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize for her family memoir Losing the Dead, while her novel The Memory Man was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and won the Canadian Holocaust Fiction Award.

Losing the Dead describes how her parents managed to survive occupied Poland by passing as Aryans.

Mad, Bad and Sad was short-listed for the Warwick Prize and long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize, amongst others, and won several awards.

She has also written the award-winning Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors in 2008 and All About Love (2011).

Appignanesi has co-written two films on Salman Rushdie for French television, presented two series of radio programmes on Sigmund Freud for BBC Radio 4, presented the arts and ideas Nightwaves programme for BBC Three, contributed to a variety of programmes, including Saturday Review, Start the Week and Woman's Hour, and written for the New Writing Partnership.

Appignanesi has appeared as a cultural commentator on many television programmes, including the BBC's Newsnight and Late Review.

She was General Editor of The Big Ideas series, published by Profile Books, which includes Violence by Slavoj Zizek and Bodies, by Susie Orbach.

Her book Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors won the 2009 British Medical Association Award for the Public Understanding of Science, among other prizes.

She has written for The New York Review of Books, The Guardian and The Observer, as well as making programmes and appearing on the BBC.

She chaired the 2017 Booker International Prize won by Olga Tokarczuk.

She is an Honorary Fellow of St Benet's Hall, Oxford and visiting professor in the Department of English at King's College London, and held a Wellcome Trust People Award there for her public series on The Brain and the Mind.