Son of Raymond J. and Miriam Hensher,[2] his father a bank manager and composer[3][4] and his mother a university librarian,[5][6] Hensher was born in South London,[where?], although he spent the majority of his childhood and adolescence in Sheffield, attending Tapton School. He did his undergraduate degree at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford,[7] before attending Jesus College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a PhD in 1992[2] for work on 18th-century painting and satire.
The Bedroom of the Mister's Wife (1999) brings together 14 of his short stories, including "Dead Languages", which A. S. Byatt selected for her Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998), making Hensher the youngest author included in the anthology.[9]
Since 2000 Philip Hensher has been listed as one of the 100 most influential LGBT people in Britain,[10] and in 2003 he was selected as one of Granta's twenty Best of Young British Novelists.[8]
In 2002 his novel The Mulberry Empire was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2008 Hensher's semi-autobiographical novel The Northern Clemency was shortlisted for the prize. In 2012 he won first prize in the German Travel Writers Award and was shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize. He also won the Stonewall Prize for the Journalist of the Year in 2007 and the Somerset Maugham Award for his novel Kitchen Venom in 1996.
In 2013 his novel Scenes from Early Life was shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize, and awarded the Ondaatje Prize. It is based on his husband's childhood against the backdrop of the war of independence in Bangladesh.
Hensher wrote the libretto for Thomas Adès's opera Powder Her Face (1995) and in 2015 he edited The Penguin Book of the British Short Story.
Hensher's early works of fiction were characterized as having an "ironic, knowing distance from their characters" and "icily precise skewerings of pretension and hypocrisy".[8] His historical novel The Mulberry Empire "echoes with the rhythm and language of folk tales" while "play[ing] games" with narrative forms.[8]
