Kate Kennedy (writer)

Kate Kennedy (born 24 September 1977) is a British biographer, academic and BBC broadcaster, who specialises in literature and music of the twentieth century.^[1] She is the Director of Oxford University's Centre for Life-Writing and Supernumerary Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford.^[2] She is also Director of the Centre for the Study of Women Composers, Director of the Museum of Music History and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.^[3]

Born in Bristol, Kennedy attended the specialist music school, Wells Cathedral School, where she studied as a cellist. In 1996 she commenced studying Music and then English at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. Despite a severe arm injury which affected her career as a cellist, in 2000 she was awarded a scholarship to the Royal College of Music where she studied for a postgraduate diploma in advanced performance.^[4] She then completed a master's degree in twentieth-century literature at King's College London, and freelanced as a baroque cellist in London, helping to found the orchestra Southbank Sinfonia with its founder-conductor Simon Over,^[5] before returning to Cambridge in 2005 where she completed a PhD at Clare Hall on the World War I poet and composer Ivor Gurney.^[6]

Kennedy has lectured in Music and English at Girton College, Cambridge, where she received a Katharine Jex-Blake Research Fellowship as well as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship.^[7][8] In 2016, she became a member of the English Faculty at Oxford University, where she is the Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (founded by Hermione Lee in 2011) and Supernumerary Fellow at Wolfson College.^[2]

Her 2024 book, Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound, tells the story of cellists Amedeo Baldovino (1916–1998), Pál Hermann (1902–1944), Lise Cristiani (1827–1853), and Anita Lasker-Wallfisch (born 1925), and their cellos.^[9] It was shortlisted for the Royal Philharmonic Society's Storytelling Award 2025.^[10] The award recognises work that newly or distinctly furthered the understanding of classical music in the UK.

• Ivor Gurney: Poet, Composer (Ivor Gurney Society Journal Special Issue, 2007)
• The First World War: Literature, Music, Memory (Routledge, 2011)
• The Silent Morning: Culture, Memory and the Armistice 1918 (Manchester University Press, 2013), co-editor with Trudi Tate^[11]
• Literary Britten (Boydell and Brewer, 2018) ^[12]
• The Fateful Voyage (play script, 2018), starring Alex Jennings^[13]
• Lives of Houses (Princeton University Press, 2020), co-editor with Hermione Lee)^[14]
• Dweller in Shadows: A Life of Ivor Gurney (Princeton University Press, 2021)^[15]
• Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound. Pegasus Books. December 2024. ISBN 9781639367504.

• Official website