Professor Sir Michael Edwards is a poet and literary scholar who specialises in French language and literature. He is an Emeritus Professor at the Collège de France, and former Professor of English at the University of Warwick. He was a student at Christ’s and has been an Honorary Fellow of the College since 2013.
Sir Michael matriculated at Christ’s in 1957, reading Modern and Medieval Languages (French and Spanish), and then pursued his PhD writing a thesis on Racine, with four years spent in France. He graduated in 1965 and became a Lecturer in French at the University of Warwick. In 1973 he took the position of Reader in Literature at the University of Essex but then returned to Warwick in 1987 as Professor of English, where he remained until 2002. He had spent the academic year 2000-01 as European Chair at the Collège de France in Paris and this led to a permanent chair with him becoming Professor of Literary Creation in the English Language. He was the first Englishman to be appointed to any chair there, and it was the first chair of English at this most prestigious French academic institution. He became Emeritus Professor from 2008.
In 2013 Sir Michael became the first British-born member of the Académie française. The elite learned body defends the purity of the French language, and Sir Michael is acclaimed for his writing in both English and French. It was in the same year that he was elected to an Honorary Fellowship at Christ’s and was made Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. The following year he received a knighthood for services to British–French cultural relations (having been awarded an OBE in 2006). He received the Chevalier de La Légion d’Honneur in 2015, and in 2018 an Honorary Doctorate of Letters was conferred by the University of Cambridge. The Académie des Jeux floraux awarded Sir Michael with the title maître ès Jeux in 2023 (an honour which dates back to the 14th century and is bestowed on the authors of poetry in French and Occitan. Sir Michael is also a prose writer, philosopher and theologian.
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