Ian Jack – Year of election 2009

Ian Jack learned the craft of journalism on Scottish newspapers in the 1960s and then moved to the Sunday Times, where latterly he reported from the Indian subcontinent. Between 1991 and 1995 he edited The Independent on Sunday and from 1995 to 2007 Granta magazine. He has contributed to many other newspapers and periodicals, including Vanity Fair, The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. He was What the Papers Say Journalist of the Year, 1985, British Press Awards Reporter of the Year, 1988, and National Newspaper Editor of the Year in the Newspaper Focus Awards, 1992. He now writes a column for The Guardian. His book Before the Oil Ran Out (1987) gathered some of his journalism. A second collection, The Country Formerly Known As Great Britain, will be published in September.

“A lot of my life has been spent wondering if I’m a writer or an editor,” he says. “Or if I’m a reporter rather than a writer – whatever the difference in these trades may be. The people I’ve most enjoyed editing and publishing include Diana Athill, the late Simon Gray and Janet Malcolm, all of them ‘observational’ writers, though it would be hard to think of good writers who aren’t. The places I’ve been happiest describing are India and Britain north of Manchester. And the past, of course, of which there is always so much.”