Lisa Appignanesi OBE FRSL[1] (born Elżbieta Borensztejn; 4 January 1946) is a Polish-born British-Canadian[citation needed] writer, novelist, and campaigner for free expression.

She is an Honorary Fellow of St Benet's Hall, Oxford and visiting professor in the Department of English at King's College London, and held a Wellcome Trust People Award there for her public series on The Brain and the Mind.

Her book Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors won the 2009 British Medical Association Award for the Public Understanding of Science, among other prizes.

[5] In 1966, she earned her BA and in 1967 her MA degree (with a thesis on Edgar Allan Poe) and married writer Richard Appignanesi.

[5] During this period she spent some time in Paris and Vienna, and wrote the thesis that became the book Proust, Musil and Henry James: femininity and the creative imagination,[5] which was published in 1974.

[5] She then lectured at New England College and in 1976 was one of the founders of the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, which included Richard Appignanesi, John Berger and Arnold Wesker and launched the graphic Beginners series with titles on Marx and Freud.

She was General Editor of The Big Ideas series, published by Profile Books, which includes Violence by Slavoj Zizek and Bodies, by Susie Orbach.

She worked as a fellow of the Brain and Behaviour Laboratory at the Open University,[5] was a council-member of the ICA (2000–06) and was Chair of the Freud Museum, London from 2008 to 2014.

As part of her work with English PEN she edited Free Expression is No Offence, a collection of writings that formed part of English PEN's protest against what became the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 and helped induce the British Government to amend the bill by inserting a robust clause protecting freedom of expression.