CV

Katherine Bucknell (b. 1957, Saigon) grew up in Washington, D.C. and was educated at Potomac School, Concord Academy and Princeton University (B.A. 1979, Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa). She holds an M.A. from Oxford University (Honours, First Class), where she was the first woman to take an undergraduate degree at Worcester College, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University (Orals and Dissertation with Distinction), where she was a Newcombe Fellow and a Whiting Fellow. She was a Junior Research Fellow at Worcester College from 1986 to 1988.

Dr. Bucknell edited W. H. Auden’s Juvenilia: Poems 1922-1928 (1994; expanded paperback 2003), and she is co-editor with Nicholas Jenkins of three volumes of Auden Studies (The Map of All My Youth (1990); The Language of Learning and the Language of Love (1994); In Solitude, for Company (1995)). She is also a founder of The W.H. Auden Society and Executive Director of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, where she initiated the L.A. Times-Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Isherwood-Bachardy Lectures at the Huntington Library, and the Don Bachardy Fellowship at the Royal Drawing School, London.

She introduced The Mortmere Stories by Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward (1994) and the Vintage edition of Kathleen and Frank (2013), and she contributed essays about Isherwood to The Isherwood Century (2000), On Modern British Fiction (2002), and The Los Angeles Review of Books (2014).

She edited and introduced the Diaries of Christopher Isherwood in four volumes (1997-2012) and The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (2013). She presented and co-produced the letters as The Animals Podcast (2017) starring Simon Callow and Alan Cumming with an audio version of Isherwood and Bachardy’s play A Meeting by the River directed by Anthony Page and starring Dominic West and Kyle Soller with music by Edmund Jolliffe.

She is the author of the major biography Christopher Isherwood Inside Out (2024).

Dr. Bucknell has written reviews, comments, and features for the Times Literary Supplement, The Daily Telegraph, The Observer, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, British Vogue, Medium, and other publications, and she has advised for and appeared on radio, TV, and films, including Susanna White’s prize-winning documentary about Auden, Tell Me the Truth About Love (2000), Guido Santi and Tina Mascara’s documentary Chris and Don: A Love Story (2007), and Tina Mascara’s forthcoming The Portrait Artist.

An essay on the British architect John Pawson appeared in his Themes and Projects (2002).

She has published four novels: Canarino (2004), Leninsky Prospekt (2005), What You Will (2007), and +1 (2013). She has also created an audiobook The Flynn Guarneri (2023) read by Annabel Mullion and Simon Callow with music by Edmund Jolliffe.

She is a keen sportswoman, awarded seven varsity letters at Princeton (lacrosse and field hockey), a Blue (field hockey), Half Blue (lacrosse), and Summer VIIIs oar at Oxford; she still enjoys running, swimming, tennis, skiing, and surfing.

She is married to Bob Maguire, managing director at Carlyle International Energy Partners, with whom she has three children. The Maguires live in London and Nantucket.