Elected: 2018
Year of birth: 1966
Frances Stonor Saunders is a journalist and historian. Her first book, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War won the Royal Historical Society’s William Gladstone Memorial Prize, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and is now published in fifteen languages. Her second, Hawkwood: Diabolical Englishman, recounts the life of John Hawkwood, a condottiere of the fourteenth century. The Woman Who Shot Mussolini is a biography of Violet Gibson, the Anglo- Irish aristocrat who shot and wounded Mussolini. Frances is a former Arts Editor of the New Statesman.
Fellows are nominated by peers and elected by our Council of writers – our governing Board. Being elected a Fellow of the RSL is a lifetime honour. This role gives them the opportunity to support other writers, readers and the future of literature. The RSL connects writers in the Fellowship to one another, and to a wider readership.
