P. N. Furbank

Philip Nicholas Furbank is an English writer, scholar and critic, and a professor (now emeritus) of the Open University. He is known for significant biographies, including E. M. Forster: A Life (1977/8), and Diderot (1992), which won a Truman Capote Award. He has also edited the works of Daniel Defoe and made major contributions to the question of attributions to Defoe, with W. R. Owens.

He was a friend of Alan Turing, becoming his literary executor, and now general editor of Turing's collected works.

He is known also as a reviewer. Other books are on the poet Mallarmé and the painter Poussin, Italo Svevo: The Man and the Writer (1966), and Behalf (1999) on political thought.