Claire Harman is a British literary critic and book reviewer who has written for the Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review, Evening Standard, the Sunday Telegraph and other publications.^[1] Harman is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has taught English at the Universities of Oxford and Manchester. She has taught creative writing at Columbia University,^[2] and been Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University since 2016.^[3]

Harman won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1989 for her biography of poet Sylvia Townsend Warner.^[4] This was followed with eponymous biographies of Fanny Burney^[5] in 2000 and Robert Louis Stevenson in 2005.^[6] In 2009, Harman published Jane's Fame, a book about the posthumous fame of novelist Jane Austen.

In 2015, Harman published what the Guardian called an 'eminently sensible'^[7] biography of Charlotte Bronte.^[8] In the same year, she won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem of the year for "The Mighty Hudson", first published in the Times Literary Supplement.^[9] In 2016, Harman won the ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award for a short story.^[10] This was followed by Murder by the Book; A Sensational Chapter in Victorian Crime^[11] in 2018.

Harman returned to literary biography with the 'innovative' ^[12]All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything^[13] in 2023.

Harman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006. She is a judge of the J.R. Ackerley Prize.