Peter D. McDonald was born in Cape Town in 1964 and educated in South Africa and England. He writes on literature, the modern state and the freedom of expression; the history of writing systems, cultural institutions and publishing; multilingualism, translation and interculturality; and on the limits of literary criticism. His publications include British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1888-1914 (1997), Making Meaning: 'Printers of the Mind' and Other Essays by D. F. McKenzie (2002), edited with Michael Suarez, and The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (2009). He is a Fellow of St Hugh's College and Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of Oxford.