Roger Lewis

Lewis was born in Caerphilly, Glamorgan in 1960. He was raised in Bedwas, Monmouthshire, and educated at Bassaleg School in Newport. He then attended the University of St Andrews, graduating MA, then Magdalen College, Oxford, where he gained the MLitt degree, both with first class honours. He became a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, in 1984.

Lewis has contributed literary journalism to the Daily Express, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph. He has written biographies of Peter Sellers (1994), Charles Hawtrey (2001), Anthony Burgess (2003), and Laurence Olivier (2007). His book on Sellers was dramatized by HBO as The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, which won a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. Seasonal Suicide Notes (2009) chronicles five years of the author's life. It was followed up by a second volume of "dyspeptic musings", What am I Doing Here? My Years as Me, in 2012. Erotic Vagrancy, his massive joint biography of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, took him 13 years to complete, and was published to generally positive reviews in October 2023.

Following the publication of his Burgess biography, Blake Morrison declared himself "appalled by Roger Lewis's 20-year quest to destroy Anthony Burgess". In defense, Lewis told Stephen Moss: "What I was trying to do with all my biographies was find a form that would suit the subject matter...Anthony Burgess was a great charlatan, so the book is full of all these mock-scholarly footnotes. I thought I'd pulled it off, and then the reviews came out and they were homicidal".

Writing a book review for the Daily Mail in August 2011, Lewis expressed a dislike of the Welsh language, calling it an "appalling and moribund monkey language". Plaid Cymru politician Jonathan Edwards reported Lewis's comments to the police and to the Press Complaints Commission.

In 2014 comments about lesbians Lewis made in a Spectator article led to publishers Biteback Publishing withdrawing an offer of a book deal.

Lewis is married - to Anna, an educational psychologist - with three sons, and lives in Hastings, with a holiday apartment in Bad Ischl, Austria. He is a lover of good art and bullfighting.

• Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. London: Quercus. 2023. ISBN 978-0-857-38172-9.
• What Am I Still Doing Here? My Life as Me. London: Coronet. 2011. ISBN 978-1-444-70868-4.
• Growing Up with Comedians. London: Century. 2010. ISBN 978-1-84413-808-1.
• Seasonal Suicide Notes: My Life as it is Lived. London: Short Books. 2009. ISBN 978-1-907595-00-4.
• The Real Life of Laurence Olivier. London: Arrow Books. 2007. ISBN 978-0-09-951366-7.
• Anthony Burgess. London: Faber and Faber. 2003. ISBN 978-0-571-21721-2.
• Charles Hawtrey 1914–1988: The Man Who Was Private Widdle. London: Faber and Faber. 2002. ISBN 978-0-571-21089-3.
• The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. London: Century. 1994.