Dr Caroline Shenton is a writer and historian. She has a degree in medieval history from St Andrews and a doctorate on the court of Edward III from Worcester College, Oxford. Having qualified as an archivist at UCL, she is the former Director of the Parliamentary Archives in London, and before that was a senior archivist at the National Archives. When she’s not writing, she is now Secretary to Council at Girton College, Cambridge.
Her first popular history book The Day Parliament Burned Down won the Political Book of the Year Award in 2013 beating Alastair Campbell, Nick Robinson and Andrew Marr to top prize, and Mary Beard called it ‘microhistory at its absolute best’ while Dan Jones considered it ‘glorious’. It was also shortlisted for a number of other prizes, and was a Book of the Year for The New Statesman, Daily Telegraph, Mail on Sunday and Herald Scotland. Its highly-acclaimed sequel, Mr Barry’s War, about the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster, was a Book of the Year in 2016 for The Daily Telegraph and BBC History Magazine and was described by Lucy Worsley as ‘a real jewel, finely wrought and beautiful’.
Caroline teaches Public History to postgraduates at the Centre for Archives and Information Studies at the University of Dundee, and during 2017 was a Political Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library.
Her third book, National Treasures, about the evacuation of London’s galleries and museums in the Second World War, was published by John Murray in November 2021.
