Image credit John Cairns
Judges
The David Cohen Prize will next be awarded in 2025.
The 2025 judges will be announced in early 2025.
Hermione Lee will continue as Chair of Judges.
Hermione Lee (Chair of Judges)

Hermione Lee is a literary biographer and Emeritus Professor of Literature at the University of Oxford, where she was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and founded the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. Her work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Penelope Fitzgerald and Tom Stoppard, critical books on Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather and Philip Roth, and books about life-writing: Body Parts in 2005, a “Very Short Introduction” to Biography in 2009, and, in 2020, a co-edited collection, Lives of Houses. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013 she was made a Dame for services to literary scholarship.
She has judged a number of literary prizes in the past, including the Booker (twice), the Hawthornden Prize (for twelve years), the W.H. Smith Award, the Guardian First Book Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. She was a judge for the David Cohen Prize in 1999 when it was awarded to William Trevor.
Past Judges
2023
Hermione Lee
Chair
Aida Edemariam
Helen Mort
Malachy Tallack
Boyd Tonkin
2021
Hermione Lee
Chair
Susheila Nasta
Peter Kemp
Maura Dooley
Reeta Chakrabarti
2019
Mark Lawson
Chair
Kate Maltby
Jon McGregor
David Park
Imtiaz Dharker
Viv Groskop
Dr Zoe Strimpel
2017
Mark Lawson
Chair
Kate Bassett
Gillian Clarke
Simon J. James
Alan Johnson
Denise Mina
Anita Sethi
2015
Mark Lawson
Chair
Gillian Bee
Adam Begley
Melissa Benn
Susannah Clapp
Blake Morrison
Leo Robson
Kamila Shamsie
Michael Symmons-Roberts
2013
Mark Lawson
Chair
Shirley Chew
Sarah Hall
Kathleen Jamie
Sam Leith
Fiona MacCarthy
Daljit Nagra
Kate Summerscale
Roy Williams
2011
Mark Lawson
Chair
Ellah Allfrey
Simon Armitage
Michael Billington
Sarah Churchwell
Tobias Hill
Kathryn Hughes
Karl Miller
Michael Prodger
2009
Andrew Motion
Chair
Rachel Bowlby
Robert Crawford
Lavinia Greenlaw
Maya Jaggi
Alberto Manguel
Jack Mapanje
Rose Tremain
John Walsh
2007
Andrew Motion
Chair
Liz Calder
Anne Enright
Jackie Kay
Hilary Mantel
Chris Smith
Peter Stothard
Boyd Tonkin
Jeremy Treglown
2005
Andrew Motion
Chair
Antony Beevor
Caroline Gascoigne
Maggie Gee
Martyn Goff
Jennifer Johnston
Doris Lessing
2003
Andrew Motion
Chair
Pat Barker
Gillian Beer
John Carey
Ciaran Carson
Damian Walford Davies
Anne Enright
Paul Muldoon
Michael Ondaatje
Philip Pullman
Michèle Roberts
Ali Smith
Stephen Tumim
Erica Wagner
2001
Andrew Motion
Chair
Claire Armitstead
Gillian Beer
Stevie Davies
Romesh Gunesekera
Catherine Lockerbie
Deborah Moggach
Alastair Niven
Glenn Patterson
Stephen Tumim
1999
Andrew Motion
Chair
Alain de Botton
Damian Walford Davies
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Roy Foster
Clare Francis
Tess Hurson
Hermione Lee
Catherine Lockerbie
Derwent May
Alan Ross
Janet Suzman
1997
Andrew Motion
Chair
Gillian Beer
Charles Brett
Simon Brett
Iain Crichton Smith
James Fenton
Miriam Gross
Griff Rhys Jones
Ben Okri
Peter Porter
Keith Thomas
M. Wynn Thomas
Claire Tomalin
1995
Michael Holroyd
Chair
Joan Bakewell
Marilyn Butler
Donnell Deeny
James Fenton
Wilson Harris
Miroslav Holub
The Lord Morris of Castle Morris
Blake Morrison
John Mortimer
Anthony Sampson
Mary-Kay Wilmers
Harriet Harvey Wood
1993
Michael Holroyd
Chair
Eleanor Bron
Seamus Heaney
Karl Miller
John Mortimer