Robert Fraser is a biographer, critic and poet. The Chameleon Poet (2001), his biography of George Barker, was Spectator Book of the Year in 2002, and in May 2012 Night Thoughts, his life of David Gascoyne, topped the Independent's list of Best Ten New Biographies. He has also published books on Marcel Proust (1994) and on the classicist and anthropologist Sir James Frazer (1990), whose magnum opus The Golden Bough he edited in 1994. He has held academic positions in Ghana, Leeds, London, and Trinity College Cambridge, UK. He is Emeritus Professor of Literature in the Open University, UK, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.