Dame Gillian Beer was recently King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of the British Academy. Her books include Darwin’s Plots, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter and Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground. She was Chair of the Poetry Book Society for four years, and has (twice) been a judge for the Booker Prize as well as the Orange Prize and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. She is currently President of the British Comparative Literature Association and on the Council of Arts Council England, East. She is currently finishing a book called Alice in Space.