Graham Macdonald Robb (born June 2, 1958) is a British author.
Robb was born in Manchester and educated at the Royal Grammar School Worcester and Exeter College, Oxford, where he studied Modern Languages. He earned a PhD in French literature at Vanderbilt University.
He won the 1997 Whitbread Book Award for best biography (Victor Hugo) and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Rimbaud in 2001. In 2007, he won the Duff Cooper Prize for The Discovery of France.
On April 28, 2008 he was awarded the £10,000 Ondaatje Prize by the Royal Society of Literature in London for The Discovery of France.
Baudelaire: Lecteur de Balzac (1988), ISBN 2-7143-0279-3
Baudelaire (1989), ISBN 0-241-12458-1, translation of 1987 French text by Claude Pichois
La Poésie de Baudelaire et la poésie française, 1838-1852 (1993), ISBN 2-7007-1657-4, criticism
Balzac: A Biography (1994), ISBN 0-330-33237-6
Unlocking Mallarmé (1996), ISBN 0-03-000648-1
Victor Hugo (1997), ISBN 0-330-33707-6
Rimbaud (2000), ISBN 0-330-48282-3
Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century (2003), ISBN 0-330-48223-8
The Discovery of France. A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War. (2007), Illustrated, 454 pp. W. W. Norton ISBN 0-393-05973-1
Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (2010), W. W. Norton ISBN 978-0-393-06724-8
Book Reviews
"In His Nightmare City" The New York Review of Books 54/11 (28 June 2007) : 52-54 [reviews Mario Vargas Llosa, The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Misérables, translated from the Spanish by John King]