Patrick McGuinness FRSL FLSW (born 1968) is a British academic, critic, novelist, and poet.

He is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, where he is Fellow and Tutor at St Anne's College.

McGuinness was born in Tunisia in 1968 to a Belgian mother and an English father of Irish descent from Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

His first novel, The Last Hundred Days (Seren, 2011) was centred on the end of the Ceaușescus' regime in Romania, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award; a French version was published under the title Les Cent Derniers Jours.

A thriller dealing with the collapse of communism, it is set in Ceaușescu's Romania, one of the most paranoid totalitarian regimes where spying on the citizens' private lives threatens all human relationships.

In 2015 he published Poetry and Radical Politics in fin-de-siècle France: From Anarchism to Action française (Oxford University Press).

His second novel, Throw Me to the Wolves, was published in 2019 by Cape and won the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award.It was also longlisted for the Crime Writers' Association (CWA)'s Gold Dagger Award.