Rupert Christiansen

Author / Journalist

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Books

Agent: Caroline Dawnay
Associate Agent: Kat Aitken

Books

Rupert Christiansen was born in London and educated at King's College, Cambridge. He has written several books, including Prima Donna, Romantic Affinities, Paris Babylon, The Visitors, Arthur Hugh Clough, Pocket Guide to Opera and The Complete Book of Aunts.   He is currently opera critic and arts columnist for The Daily Telegraph, dance critic for the Mail on Sunday and a member of the editorial board of Opera magazine. He has contributed to many newspapers and magazines, including the Spectator, TLS, Literary Review, Harpers & Queen, Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Talk. In 1997, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is the British judge for the Birgit Nilsson Prize.

LATEST PUBLICATION

I KNOW YOU'RE GOING TO BE HAPPY: A STORY OF LOVE AND BETRAYAL,, Short Books, 7th March 2013

They married at St Mary Abbots, Kensington, in September 1948, the groom, the ambitious son of the editor of the Express; the bride, the beautiful, somewhat rebellious daughter of blamelessly upstanding family of the provincial middle-middle class. A young man who was pushed forward by family expectation, a young woman pulled back...In this poignant and perceptive portrait of his parents' catastrophically acrimonious divorce, Rupert Christiansen tells the story of a generation. With the narrative power of the likes of The Ice Storm and Revolutionary Road, he chronicles the experience not just of one particular class, but of an era, when the loosening of the stays on middle-class marriage precipitated a rollercoaster decade of heartbreak and loss.

 
 

Non-Fiction

Publication DetailsNotes
2013

Short, Books

Through this poignant and perceptive portrait of his parents' impassioned marriage and acrimonious divorce, Rupert Christiansen chronicles with novelistic power a generation for whom the experience of the Sixties brought emotional chaos as well as liberation.

2007

Short Books

A look at English hymns.

2006

Faber & Faber

A compendium of aunthood in all its varieties.

2004

Pimlico

Portraits From an Age 1780-1830

2003

Short Books

Biography for children.

2002

Faber & Faber

A handy, readable and easy-to-use opera guide containing entries for over a hundred works, both familiar and unfamiliar.