BOYD TONKIN is an award-winning British writer, journalist and critic who chaired the judging panel of the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 – the English-speaking world’s premier award for translated fiction. He writes for The Observer, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Economist, The Spectator, New Scientist and Newsweek magazine, and contributes to BBC radio. Until April 2016 he was Senior Writer and Art Critic of The Independent, and was the newspaper’s Literary Editor from 1996 to 2013. He re-founded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2001, steering and co-judging it every year until 2015, when its unique format of honouring author and translator equally was adopted by the Man Booker International Prize.
Boyd Tonkin has reported and commented on literary and artistic issues from more than 30 countries on five continents, and been an invited speaker at festivals and universities around the world. His work has appeared in books ranging from The Oxford Good Fiction Guide and a new edition of Muriel Spark’s writing on the Brontës, to Reading the Vampire Slayer. He has also judged the Booker Prize, the Whitbread biography award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement (the ‘British Nobel’) and the Prix Cévennes in France. He is an Adviser to the Booker Prize Foundation, Trustee of the Orwell Prize, Associate Editor of the journal Critical Muslim, Contributing Editor to The Arts Desk online, and Fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar. He read English and French at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was both an entrance scholar and a senior scholar, and has taught literature in higher education.