Jacqueline Rose

Jacqueline Rose (born 1949) is a British academic who is a professor and co-director at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. She is known for her work on the relationship between psychoanalysis, feminism, and literature. In July 2026, she was announced as winner of the PEN Pinter Prize, awarded annually by English PEN.

Early life and education

Rose was born and grew up in Hayes in west London with her two sisters. Her elder sister was the philosopher Gillian Rose, and she is a cousin of the theatre director Braham Murray. Her father, a doctor, arrived in the United Kingdom from a prisoner-of-war camp where he had been tortured; he and her mother, who was prevented by her family from attending medical school, divorced when Rose was five. Rose grew up with her stepfather, who was also a doctor, and whose surname she took along with her sister. Approximately fifty members of her mother's family, the Prevezers, had been murdered by the Nazis in the Chełmno extermination camp in central Poland.

Rose graduated from St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she studied English. She gained her master's degree in comparative literature from the Sorbonne, Paris, where she was influenced by Julia Kristeva, became interested in Sigmund Freud, worked at Yves Saint Laurent, and began her doctoral research on children's literature. She received her doctorate in 1979 from the University College London (UCL), where she was supervised by Frank Kermode.