Sarah Harkness

After studying PPE at Oxford, Sarah had a career in corporate finance and later served on various senior boards in the NHS and education sectors.  She holds an Honorary Doctorate from Sheffield University and an Honorary Fellowship at Mansfield College, Oxford. In October 2021 she was awarded an MA with Distinction in Biography at the University of Buckingham.

In 2018 a ten-year personal interest in a pioneering Victorian artist and author led to her writing and self-publishing a biography, Nelly Erichsen: A Hidden Life, which was long-listed for the 2019 William MB Berger Prize for British Art History. In 2021 she won The Tony Lothian Prize, awarded by The Biographers’ Club for the best proposal for an uncommissioned biography, and her biography of Daniel and Alexander Macmillan, Literature for the People, was published by PanMacmillan in May 2024.