Lisa Appignanesi

Lisa Appignanesi (born Elżbieta Borensztejn; 4 January 1946) is a British-Canadian writer, novelist, and campaigner for free expression. Until 2021, she was the Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, and is a former President of English PEN and Chair of the Freud Museum London. She chaired the 2017 Booker International Prize won by Olga Tokarczuk. She is an Honorary Fellow of St Benet's Hall, Oxford and Visiting Professor in the Department of English at King's College London, and held a Wellcome Trust People Award there for her public series on The Brain and the Mind. Her book Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors won the 2009 British Medical Association Award for the Public Understanding of Science, among other prizes. She has written for The New York Review of Books, The Guardian and The Observer, as well as making programmes and appearing on the BBC.