Famous Oxford people
Profiles of notable writers, scientists and figures associated with Oxford — their colleges, the addresses where they lived, and the places they made famous.
C.S. Lewis
1898–1963 · Author, scholar of medieval literature
Author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Undergraduate at University College, Fellow at Magdalen for 29 years, lived at The Kilns from 1930.
Dorothy Hodgkin
1910–1994 · Chemist, X-ray crystallographer
Somerville chemist, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1964 — the only British woman scientist to win a Nobel. Solved the structures of penicillin, vitamin B12, and insulin.
Dorothy L. Sayers
1893–1957 · Novelist, translator, dramatist
Born in the Old Choir House on Brewer Street, Oxford. Read modern French at Somerville (first, 1915). Created Lord Peter Wimsey and set Gaudy Night in her old college.
Evelyn Waugh
1903–1966 · Novelist
Hertford undergraduate from January 1922 — left without a degree, but the Oxford circle around the Hypocrites' Club fed Brideshead Revisited.
Graham Greene
1904–1991 · Novelist, journalist
Read history at Balliol, graduated 1925 with a second. Sixty-seven years of writing and over twenty-five novels followed.
J.R.R. Tolkien
1892–1973 · Philologist, novelist, professor
Author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings — Oxford undergraduate at Exeter, Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor at Pembroke, Merton Professor of English at Merton.
James Murray
1837–1915 · Lexicographer; primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary
Scottish-born self-taught philologist, primary editor of the OED 1879–1915. Built the Scriptorium in his garden at 78 Banbury Road. Knighted 1908. Buried at Wolvercote.
Lewis Carroll
1832–1898 · Mathematician, author, photographer
Christ Church mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland under the pen name Lewis Carroll.
Oscar Wilde
1854–1900 · Playwright, poet, novelist
Magdalen undergraduate 1874–1878 — read Greats, won the Newdigate Prize for 'Ravenna', graduated with a double first.
Roger Bannister
1929–2018 · Athlete, neurologist
First man under four minutes for the mile — Iffley Road, Oxford, 6 May 1954, 3:59.4. Read medicine at Exeter, later Master of Pembroke. Buried at Wolvercote.
Stephen Hawking
1942–2018 · Theoretical physicist, cosmologist
Born in Oxford, undergraduate at University College — first-class BA in physics. Lucasian Professor at Cambridge from 1979.
W.H. Auden
1907–1973 · Poet
Christ Church undergraduate, then Professor of Poetry 1956–1961, returned to a Christ Church cottage in 1972 — Pulitzer for The Age of Anxiety.