Peter D. McDonald, Professor of English and Related Literature, University of Oxford and Fellow, St Hugh's College

Peter D. McDonald was born in Cape Town in 1964 and educated in South Africa and England. He writes on literature, the modern state and the freedom of expression; the history of writing systems, cultural institutions and publishing; multilingualism, translation and interculturality; and on the limits of literary criticism. His publications include British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1888-1914 (1997), Making Meaning: 'Printers of the Mind' and Other Essays by D. F. McKenzie (2002), edited with Michael Suarez, and The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (2009). He is a Fellow of St Hugh's College and Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of Oxford.

"The book's breadth is dizzying, its depth oceanic ... Treating poems, novels, literary journals and constitutions as 'artefacts of writing', objects of human and state workmanship, McDonald ferries between character and charter, plot point and preamble. The result is a well-wrought work of visionary scholarship." - Hunter Dukes, Times Literary Supplement

"Serenely mastering some intransigently disparate material and generating one startling insight after another, Artefacts of Writing radically enlarges the scope of global intellectual and literary history. It also extends its implications into conventionally unrelated realms of knowledge. It is hard to imagine a more rewarding and stimulating book this year." - Pankaj Mishra, essayist and novelist, author of Age of Anger: A History of the Present

"Peter D McDonalds scholarly Artefacts of Writing presents a challenge — again, at once perspicacious and playful — to how we read literature in a time when diversity is being invoked again, but when its promise will lead to disappointment unless we tackle the question with imagination and singularity, as McDonald does." - Amit Chaudhuri, Open Magazine