Michael Bird

Michael Bird (born 12 April 1958) is a British author and art historian. He was born in London and educated at Haberdashers' Aske's School and Merton College, Oxford. After teaching at Sherborne School he worked in publishing, including a stint on the editorial team of the Macmillan Dictionary of Art (now Oxford Art Online). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Bird published poetry, essays and reviews. His books on modern British art include monographs on the artists Sandra Blow (2005), Bryan Wynter (2010), Lynn Chadwick (2014) and George Fullard (2017),The St Ives Artists: A Biography of Place and Time (2008, 2nd edn. 2016) and Studio Voices: Art and Life in 20th-century Britain (2018). He has also written a history of art for children, Vincent's Starry Night and Other Stories (2016). Bird has written for The Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, Modern Painters, Tate Etc and PN Review. His work for radio includes contributions to the BBC arts programmes Kaleidoscope, Night Waves and The Essay, and features for BBC Radio 3 and 4, including The Wreck of the Alba (2009), based on a painting by Alfred Wallis, Lanyon's Last Flight (2011), The Flower Fields (2012) and Frost–Heron (2017). Bird was National Life Stories Goodison Fellow in 2016. In 2018 he was appointed Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Exeter. Bird lives in Cornwall with his wife, the artist Felicity Mara.