At Faber & Faber, he edited writers as various as Milan Kundera, Lorrie Moore, Mario Vargas Llosa, Barbara Kingsolver, Marilynne Robinson, Harold Pinter, and Hanif Kureishi, as well as discovering the work of Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, Booker Prize winner Peter Carey and American masters such as Paul Auster.

      At The Observer, he established himself as a newspaper critic to be reckoned with, a lively cultural commentator, and also as a highly entertaining interviewer of writers such as V.S. Naipaul, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Lorrie Moore, Clive James, Alan Bennett and Seamus Heaney.  

In between these two remarkable careers, McCrum was dramatically unwell with a serious stroke, a life-changing experience he describes in the Picador Classic, My Year Off, his acclaimed memoir of 1995-1996. For Radio 4, he has recently completed three acclaimed series, “Shakespeare and the American Dream”, “The Life in My Head: From Stroke to Brain Attack”, and “America Rewritten”.

McCrum’s most recent book, Shakespearean (Picador), is a rich and superbly-drawn portrait of one of the greatest writers who ever lived, McCrum makes a passionate and deeply personal case that Shakespeare’s words and ideas are not just enduring in their relevance.

Why is it that we always return to Shakespeare in times of crisis? What is the key to his hold on our imagination? And why do the Collected Works of an Elizabethan writer continue to speak to us as if they were written yesterday?

Insightful, witty, and always passionate, Robert McCrum argues that Shakespeare's words and ideas are nothing less than the eternal key to our shared humanity.

McCrum’s previous book, Every Third Thought (Picador), was published in August 2017. Writing in the Mail on Sunday, Andrew Marr said “McCrum's awe at the mystery of the human brain is matched by his deep understanding of the consolations of music and literature . . . As I closed it, I found myself encouraged and fortified”. For the novelist, Kate Mosse, it is “Thoughtful, subtle, elegantly clever and oddly joyous. Every Third Thought is beautiful.”

      As well as his contemporary work as a journalist, in 2005 McCrum also published a highly acclaimed and definitive life of P.G. Wodehouse, a biography described by John Le Carre as “The last word; the seminal work of reference. As the Master might say – ripping.”

      In 2018, Robert McCrum, who already has a Ph. D from Cambridge, was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Exeter University. In his citation, given at Truro Cathedral on 23 July, Dr Rob Magnuson Smith said the following:

“Many who doubt the possibility of life after death proceed to their graves with little concern for the aftermath. Robert McCrum has built his extraordinary career on the opposite approach. His quixotic ability to recognise the essential in literature has resulted in its everlasting availability. His creative writing captures the deeply consequential for those hungry for meaning in the face of absurdity. He has dodged the grim reaper for the benefit of humankind. His biography is a startling chronology of literary achievement.  

Robert is an editor, journalist, novelist, memoirist, Peabody and Emmy-award winning scriptwriter and internationally-recognised cultural historian. At Faber and Faber, from 1979 to 1996, he edited the luminaries—William Golding, Kazuo Ishiguro, Milan Kundera, Peter Carey, Paul Auster, Marilynne Robinson, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jayne Anne Phillips, Orhan Pamuk, and many more. Jayne Anne Phillips asked me to praise Robert for being “astute, unwaveringly supportive, and kind.” 2010 Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa wrote with the following statement:

I was very lucky to be able to count Robert McCrum as my friend, as well as my editor at Faber, during the years I lived in London. I took full advantage of his advice and vast literary knowledge, and closely followed his magnificent work as a journalist and writer: I have in mind the formidable testimony he wrote of the tragic accident he suffered, and which furnished him with the raw materials to write a small masterpiece.

To date, Robert has edited four Nobel laureates (Vargas Llosa, Pinter, Pamuk and Ishiguro), some of whom were virtually unknown at the time. He took his job description at Faber seriously. As the ‘new boy’ at a top publishing house taking risks, he was expected ‘to find the next Golding.’

Britain’s most recent Nobel Prize winner, Kazuo Ishiguro wrote with this:

Robert literally discovered me – no recommendations or intermediaries. Three stories in a brown envelope from a total unknown, and thereafter he championed me with passion all the way to a Booker Prize win. On the page he was my ideal editor. With each book we worked on, he was able to point to the two or three crucial areas where ‘something wasn’t right’. He never offered remedies himself. He just conveyed his sense of where something was wrong, then sent me away to work it out.

After Faber, Robert served as literary editor of the Observer from 1996 to 2010, blithely producing a steady output of erudite commentaries, reviews and literary reflections. He also continued writing new work. Seven novels. A biography of PG Wodehouse. A nine-part, Emmy-award winning television series The Story of English which traces the evolution and social impact of the English language. In the States, the programme was a sensation. What might have been an arcane academic subject somehow became riveting television.

Robert’s conscientious public engagement exemplifies the best of Exeter University. It is particularly gratifying to honour him here in Cornwall, where William Golding lived and wrote for many years. Any of Robert’s accomplishments would be impressive on their own. Collectively, they represent the output of a literary icon dedicated to imbuing the world with consideration for the written word. What makes Robert McCrum’s career even more remarkable requires a word about his early encounter with death.

On the 28th of July, 1995 Robert went to bed after a glass of champagne and woke up to find the left side of his body completely paralysed. He’d had a massive stroke. He was lucky to be alive. His prognosis was dire—but he harnessed what he called a ‘weird exhilaration’ to be alive, and reaffirmed his faith in literature. What followed was an important book. My Year Off: Rediscovering Life After a Stroke has become an essential touchstone, an intimate exploration of the condition. The book has been so successful, he is sought after for the very thing all good writers aim for—words for the ineffable. Like it or not, Robert has become what he calls ‘a lightning conductor for a thunderstorm of physical calamity that is raging just over the horizon.’

Writers who don’t flinch from expressions of authenticity, like Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky and Beckett, speak from continually refreshed shadows of death. McCrum’s Every Third Thought—taken from the Prospero quote about the number of times death comes to mind—appeared in 2017 and serialised on BBC Radio 4. It should be no surprise that Shakespeare’s ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun’ is his favourite poem. He’s not dead yet, by the way—he’s right over there. His most recent book Shakespearean came out in 2020.

Chancellor, it is my honour to present Mr Robert McCrum for the degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa.”