Kwame Anthony Appiah was born in London and grew up in Ghana. Since finishing his philosophy doctorate at Cambridge, he has mostly lived and worked in America, in a peripatetic career that began at Yale and took him by way of long stints at Harvard and Princeton to New York University. En route, he has written about African-American and African Studies, literary criticism, ethics, political theory and the philosophy of language and mind, published three novels, and addressed the wider reading public in books like Cosmopolitanism, The Honor Code, and Experiments in Ethics. He has been President of the PEN American Center and of the Modern Language Association. His next book, Mistaken Identities, is based on his 2016 Reith Lectures.
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.