Dinner with Joseph Johnson

*Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize*In late eighteenth-century London, a group of extraordinary people gathered around a dining table once a week. The host was Joseph Johnson, publisher and bookseller and he was joined at dinner by a shifting constellation of great minds including William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Henry Fuseli, Anna Barbauld and Mary Wollstonecraft. Johnson's years as a maker of books saw profound change in Britain and abroad. In this remarkable portrait of a revolutionary age, Daisy Hay captures a changing nation through the stories of the men and women who wrote it into being, and whose ideas still influence us today. 'Rich in period and personal detail' Guardian'Hugely engrossing' Sunday Times

Daisy Hay is an award-winning biographer whose previous work includes Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives and Mr and Mrs Disraeli: A Strange Romance. She began her writing career as a doctoral student and then a Bye-Fellow at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge before moving to Oxford where she held the Alistair Horne Fellowship at St Antony's College and a Visiting Scholarship at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing at Wolfson College. She has also held a Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard. In 2016 she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize by the Leverhulme Trust and in 2018 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is currently Associate Professor in English Literature and Life Writing at the University of Exeter and lives in Devon with her family.