Bart Van Es

Bart van Es was born in the Netherlands and grew up in Norway, Indonesia, and Dubai before moving permanently to the UK as a teenager and going on to study English at Cambridge. Since 1999 he has worked at the University of Oxford, where he is now Professor of English Literature and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College. His academic books include Shakespeare in Company, which traces the influence of the playwright’s fellow actors on his writing style, and Shakespeare’s Comedies: a Very Short Introduction. In 2014 he began to look into his family’s wartime history, knowing that his grandparents had been part of the Dutch resistance. This work has resulted in a factual novel, The Cut Out Girl: a Story of War and Family, Lost and Found, which was published by Fig Tree in 2018 with translations in French, German, Italian, Danish, and Dutch.