Dr. Lisa Appignanesi is an internationally acclaimed Polish-born British-Canadian Jewish writer, novelist, cultural critic, and public intellectual. She is an Honorary Fellow of St Benet’s Hall, Oxford, and visiting professor in the Department of English at King’s College London. She served as the President of English PEN and Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2013, she was awarded an OBE for her services to literature.
Born in post-war Poland to Holocaust survivor parents, Appignanesi’s personal history is defined by exile, secrets, and displaced identity—themes poignantly captured in her celebrated memoir, Losing the Dead. Her interdisciplinary expertise, spanning psychoanalysis, history of psychology, and feminism, grants her a unique perspective on how state violence erases individual dignity and history through the manipulation of narratives. Her other non-fiction includes Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness, All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion; Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present; Freud’s Women (with John Forrester); and a biographical portrait of Simone de Beauvoir.
In 2007, Appignanesi was a signatory to a statement by Independent Jewish Voices (UK), which called for, among other things, the recognition of a Palestinian unity government and the end of the economic boycott. She has expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, aiming to put pressure on the Israeli government regarding its treatment of Palestinians. She has noted that the movement is modeled on the South African boycott, designed to combat policies she described as discrimination and brutality against Palestinians.
As a former head of English PEN, she has consistently stood against censorship. She argues that supporting Palestinian rights is frequently met with systemic silencing, and that denying a people the right to tell their own story of suffering is a form of violence. During the humanitarian crises in Gaza, she has been a key signatory to petitions calling for an immediate ceasefire and protesting attacks on Palestinian journalists. She maintains that for writers, silence in the face of such “unspeakable tragedy” is complicity.