British · b. 1964
Francis Spufford writes books that defy genre boundaries. The British author has produced works of imaginative nonfiction, a novel about the Soviet planned economy, and "Light Perpetual," which imagines alternative lives for five children killed by a V-2 rocket in 1944. That novel earned a 2021 Booker Prize longlisting and the 2022 Ondaatje Prize. Spufford's work combines historical research with speculative imagination, asking what might have been while honoring what was.