Francis Young is a UK-based historian and folklorist.

Francis is the author of over two dozen books including Silence of the Gods (shortlisted for the 2026 Wolfson History Prize), and is well-known as an authority on the religious history of Britain and the Baltic region. He is a Series Editor for Cambridge University Press, co-editing Elements in Folklore, and teaches for Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education. He is a Council member of the Folklore Society.

Francis was born in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk and studied Philosophy at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and Classics at University of Wales, Lampeter before receiving his doctorate in History from Cambridge University. He is a Fellow of both the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Historical Society and was Volumes Editor for the Catholic Record Society between 2015 and 2017. He spent several years as Head of Sixth Form at an English cathedral school and was appointed a Senior Research Associate at the University of Portsmouth in 2024. He regularly appears on BBC radio as well as writing for numerous newspapers and magazines.

Francis is a lay Reader in the Church of England and an honorary life member of the Churches Conservation Trust. His books have been shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize and the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award, while his book Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic was the winner of the AABS Book Subvention Award in 2021. In 2023 his work on the religious history of Suffolk was recognised when he was made a lay canon of St Edmundsbury Cathedral. He is a contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and writes for Dorling Kindersley, as well as contributing to several textbooks and anthologies.

Francis is a member of the Society of Indexers, the Society of Authors, the Prayer Book Society, the Society for Neo-Latin Studies and the Suffolk Records Society (among others). He is the Secretary of the British-Lithuanian Society and editor of its magazine, Tiltas.

You can follow Francis on Twitter and Bluesky as well as his Substack ‘All Old Strange Things’.