Sophie Ratcliffe is professor of literature and creative criticism at the University of Oxford and a fellow and tutor at Lady Margaret Hall. In addition to her scholarly books, including On Sympathy, she has published commentary pieces and book reviews for the Guardian, the New Statesman, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other outlets, and has served a judge for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and the Wellcome Book Prize.
Ratcliffe's latest book is Loss, A Love Story: Imagined Histories and Brief Encounters.
At the Guardian she tagged five of the best books shaped by lists, including:
Schindler’s Ark by Thomas KeneallyRead about the other entries on the list.
Published in the US as Schindler’s List, Keneally’s Booker prize-winning historical novel tells of the German industrialist who saved more than 1,000 Jewish factory workers from Nazi death camps. Oskar Schindler used the medium by which the Nazis worked – the dehumanising list – to save lives, writing a list of his own by which he extricated his employees: “Oskar’s list, in the mind of some, was already more than a mere tabulation … It was a sweet chariot which might swing low.” The novel also focuses on the tragedy of those not carried to safety. Schindler’s list “is life”, but “all round its cramped margins lies the gulf”.
--Marshal Zeringue
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