Stephen Bernard

Stephen Jarrod Bernard FSA FRSA FRHistS FHEA (born 1975) is an Academic Visitor at the [https://www.english.ox.ac.uk Faculty of English Language and Literature], University of Oxford and a member of University College. A prize-winning essayist, editor, and bibliographer, he is known mostly for his bibliographical and book historical work on the Tonson publishing house which posited one of the greatest and most fundamental questions about all English literature: "Who invented English literature, that is, as a conceptual category defined by canon and tradition? ... As good a claimant as any is the London bookseller Jacob Tonson."

In a very different field, his memoir about the sustained serial, clerical childhood sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton in the 1980s and 90s, his consequent mental illness, and the pioneering experimental psychiatric ketamine treatment he has received was a book of the year in the New Statesman and Evening Standard, and highly acclaimed by such writers as the double Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel, Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle, neurosurgeon Henry Marsh and theologian Richard Holloway. It was In 2019 he was a Core Participant at the statutory Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. Provided by Wikipedia