Caroline Alexander is an author and journalist. After graduating from Somerville College, Oxford, she obtained a PhD in classics at Columbia University, New York. In 2015 she became the first woman to publish a full-length English translation of Homer's Iliad. She has written for The New Yorker, Granta, and National Geographic. Her books include One Dry Season: In the Footsteps of Mary Kingsley, The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War, The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty, and The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition. She taught classics at Chancellor College in Zomba, part of the University of Malawi, from 1982 to 1985 during the rule of Hastings Banda.
