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 forthcoming book is Loss, A Love Story: Imagined Histories and Brief Encounters.
At the Guardian she tagged five of the best books about eating, including:
The Gastronomical Me by MFK FisherRead about the other entries on the list.
Fisher’s pioneering “gastrography” or “foodoir” won plaudits on its 1943 publication. Most famously from one of greatest poets of the 20th century. “I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose”, wrote WH Auden. Fisher’s story is about her personal experience of food and the pain of war. She writes richly and variously of food and communion, of “the warm round peach pie and the cool yellow cream”, of how she “ate bread on a lasting hillside” or “drank red wine in a room now blown to bits”. An extraordinary combination of travelogue and feminism, strawberry jam and oysters, fascists and refugees, love and hunger.
--Marshal Zeringue
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