William Fiennes

Bestselling author of The Snow Geese and The Music Room

William Fiennes is the bestselling author of The Snow Geese and The Music Room. He has contributed reviews, essays and stories to many publications, including the London Review of Books, Granta, the Observer and the Times Literary Supplement. The Snow Geese, published to wide acclaim in 2002, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and won the Hawthornden Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. William Fiennes was the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2003. On publication in 2009, The Music Room was called “a small masterpiece” (Sunday Telegraph), “a brilliant work” (Irish Times), “completely uplifting” (Metro) and “a beautiful and fortifying book, even a great one” (Daily Telegraph).

Fiennes spent two years as Fellow in the Creative Arts at Wolfson College, Oxford. Since 2007, he has been Writer-in-Residence at the American School in London, and at Cranford Community College, Hounslow. He is Director and co-founder of the charity First Story, which supports creativity and literacy in challenging secondary schools. Fiennes was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.