Richard Cohen

b. 1941

Richard Cohen was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2017.

Richard Cohen is the author of By The Sword (a history of swordplay), Chasing the Sun (a history of our star), and How to Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers. From 2015 to 2017, he has been the tour expert for the New York Times tour of the World War I battlefields of France and Belgium. He is a former publishing director of Hutchinson and Hodder & Stoughton, and the founder of Richard Cohen Books, as well as former director of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature. He has edited books by such authors as Tony Benn, Barbara Castle, Michael Heseltine, John Keegan, Madeleine Albright, John le Carré, Fay Weldon, Sebastian Faulks, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Holmes, Victoria Glendinning and Hilary Spurling.

A writer-in-residence in The New York Public Library’s Frederick Lewis Allen Room, he was for seven years visiting professor in creative writing at the university of Kingston-upon-Thames.  He has written for most UK quality newspapers as well as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He is a five-time U.K. national sabre champion and was selected for the British Olympic fencing team in 1972, 1976, 1980, and 1984.  He lives in New York City with his wife, the literary agent Kathy Robbins.

His current project is A History of Historians.