Amanda Foreman (biographer)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Amanda Lucy Foreman (born 1968 in London, England, UK) is an award-winning British/American biographer.
The daughter of renowned screenwriter and film producer Carl Foreman (1914-1984) who had to move to England in order to work after being blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses during the McCarthyism period of the 1950s.
Amanda Foreman, was educated at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York then at Columbia University before returning to the UK when she was awarded the 1993 “Henrietta Jex Blake Senior Scholarship” at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. At Oxford she completed an MPhil with a thesis entitled, Politics or providence?: why the Houses of Parliament voted to abolish the slave trade in 1807 (1993), and a DPhil with a thesis entitled, The political life of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, 1757-1806 (1998).
She remained at Oxford as a researcher and in 1998, she published her first book, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, based on her doctoral thesis. Published by HarperCollins in the UK and Random House in the U.S., the book received wide critical acclaim and won the 1998 Whitbread Prize for Best Biography. Her book has been the subject of a television documentary, a highly successful radio play, starring Dame Judi Dench, and a film, 'The Duchess', starring Ralph Fiennes and Keira Knightley.
Foreman has dual citizenship and maintains homes in New York City and London and writes regularly for newspapers and magazines in both countries. Since marrying Jonathan Barton in 2000, she has had five children: Helena (2002), Theodore (2003), Halcyon (2005), Xanthe (2007) and Hero (2007). She is currently researching and writing her next book; 'Our American Cousins'; The history of the British volunteers of the American Civil War.
