Ian Thomson | |
|---|---|
 Ian Thomson in Jamaica | |
| Born | 1961 |
| Nationality | English |
| Education | Dulwich College; Pembroke College, Cambridge |
| Notable works | Primo Levi (biography; 2002), The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica (reportage; 2009), Dante's Divine Comedy: A Journey Without End (criticism; 2018) |
Ian Thomson (born 1961) is an English author, best known for his biography Primo Levi (2002), and reportage, The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica (2009)
Ian Thomson was born in London in 1961. His parents moved to New York City that same year, where his father worked for a Wall Street bank. (His mother, a Baltic émigrée, came to England in 1947 at the age of 17.) Thomson was educated at Dulwich College, then at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he read English. He is the godson of the British painter Carel Weight. In the 1980s he taught English literature and English as a foreign language in Rome, then became a translator, journalist and writer, contributing to the Sunday Times Magazine , The Independent , The Guardian , The Observer , The Spectator and Times Literary Supplement . He was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University College London. Currently he is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Non-Fiction at the University of East Anglia. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL).
His first important book, Bonjour Blanc: A Journey Through Haiti (1992), an amalgam of history and adventure, was recommended by J. G. Ballard as "hair-raising but hugely entertaining", and by the film director Jonathan Demme as "a great and abiding classic". His book, Primo Levi (2002), [1] a biography, took 10 years to write and is seen today as the definitive life of the Italian writer and concentration camp survivor. It won the RSL's W. H. Heinemann Award and was shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly ′s Wingate Literary Prize and the Koret Jewish Book Award. (A centenary edition of the biography was published in 2019, fully updated and with a new preface, as Primo Levi: The Elements of a Life.)
In 2005 Thomson went back to the West Indies to write The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica (2009), [2] [3] seen by some as one of the most controversial books written on Jamaica. In 2010 The Dead Yard was awarded the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize [4] as well as the Dolman Travel Book Award. Zadie Smith spoke of it in Harper's Magazine as a "truly excellent book".
Thomson edited Articles of Faith: The Collected Tablet Journalism of Graham Greene (2006), and contributed a short story to Kingston Noir (2012), a collection of fiction set in the Jamaican capital by various contemporary writers. In 2011, he donated the memoir, Fall and Rise of a Rome Patient, to Oxfam’s "OxTravel" project, a collection of UK articles by 36 writers. Thomson has translated the Sicilian crime writer Leonardo Sciascia into English, and has lectured at Columbia University, Princeton University and the Royal Society, London.
Dante's Journey: A Journey Without End (2018), Ian Thomson's "biography" of Dante's great poem, was a Financial Times and Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year.
In 2022 an interview Thomson conducted in Sicily with Leonardo Sciascia at the age of 24 was published as a book, Una conversazione a Palermo con Leonardo Sciascia; it contained a correspondence between Thomson and Sciascia.
Ian Thomson lives in London with his wife and children.
Primo Michele Levi was an Italian chemist, partisan, writer, and Jewish Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works include If This Is a Man, his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and The Periodic Table (1975), linked to qualities of the elements, which the Royal Institution named the best science book ever written.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1987.
Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She has been a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University since September 2010.
The Royal Society of Literature (RSL) is a learned society founded in 1820, by King George IV, to "reward literary merit and excite literary talent". A charity that represents the voice of literature in the UK, the RSL has about 600 Fellows, elected from among the best writers in any genre currently at work. Additionally, Honorary Fellows are chosen from those who have made a significant contribution to the advancement of literature, including publishers, agents, librarians, booksellers or producers. The society is a cultural tenant at London's Somerset House.
Leonardo Sciascia was an Italian writer, novelist, essayist, playwright, and politician. Some of his works have been made into films, including Porte Aperte, Cadaveri Eccellenti, Todo Modo and Il giorno della civetta.
Pascale Petit, is a French-born British poet of French, Welsh and Indian heritage. She was born in Paris and grew up in France and Wales. She trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art and was a visual artist for the first part of her life. She has travelled widely, particularly in the Peruvian and Venezuelan Amazon and India.
Sir Philip Christopher Ondaatje, OC, CBE, FRSL is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian–English businessman, philanthropist, adventurer, writer and bob-sledding Olympian for Canada. Ondaatje is the older brother of the author Michael Ondaatje and lives in both Chester, Nova Scotia, and the United Kingdom.
Rana Dasgupta is a British Indian novelist and essayist. He grew up in Cambridge, England, and studied at Balliol College, Oxford, the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud in Aix-en-Provence, and, as a Fulbright Scholar, the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 2010 The Daily Telegraph called him one of Britain's best novelists under 40. In 2014 Le Monde named him one of 70 people who are making the world of tomorrow. Among the prizes won by Dasgupta's works are the Commonwealth Prize and the Ryszard Kapuściński Award.
Colin Gerald Dryden Thubron, FRAS is a British travel writer and novelist. In 2008, The Times ranked him among the 50 greatest postwar British writers. He is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Times. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Thubron was appointed a CBE in the 2007 New Year Honours. He is a Fellow and, between 2009 and 2017, was President of the Royal Society of Literature.
If This Is a Man is a memoir by Italian Jewish writer Primo Levi, first published in 1947. It describes his arrest as a member of the Italian anti-fascist resistance during the Second World War, and his incarceration in the Auschwitz concentration camp (Monowitz) from February 1944 until the camp was liberated on 27 January 1945.
The Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize is an annual literary award given by the Royal Society of Literature. The £10,000 award is for a work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry that evokes the "spirit of a place", and is written by someone who is a citizen of or who has been resident in the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland.
Andrew Michael Duncan Lycett FRSL is an English biographer and journalist.
The Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards celebrate the best travel writing and travel writers in the world. The awards include the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year and the Edward Stanford Award for Outstanding Contribution to Travel Writing.
Kapka Kassabova is a poet and writer of fiction and narrative non-fiction. Her mother tongue is Bulgarian, but she writes in English.
Carole Angier is an English biographer. She was born in London and was raised in Canada before moving back to the UK in her early twenties. She spent many years as a teacher, including periods at the Open University and Birkbeck College, University of London. In 2002, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
The John Florio Prize for Italian translation is awarded by the Society of Authors, with the co-sponsorship of the Italian Cultural Institute and Arts Council England. Named after the Tudor Anglo-Italian writer-translator John Florio, the prize was established in 1963. As of 1980 it is awarded biannually for the best English translation of a full-length work of literary merit and general interest from Italian.
Olivia Laing is a British writer, novelist and cultural critic. She is the author of four works of non-fiction, To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring,The Lonely City, and Everybody, as well as an essay collection, Funny Weather, and a novel, Crudo. In 2018, she was awarded the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for non-fiction and in 2019, the 100th James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Crudo. In 2019 she became an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Aida Edemariam is an Ethiopian-Canadian journalist based in the UK, who has worked in New York, Toronto and London. She was formerly deputy review and books editor of the Canadian National Post, and is now a senior feature writer and editor at The Guardian in the UK. She lives in Oxford. Her memoir about her Ethiopian grandmother, The Wife's Tale: A Personal History, won the Ondaatje Prize in 2019.
Jay Bernard, FRSL, is a British writer, artist, film programmer, and activist from London, UK. Bernard has been a programmer at BFI Flare since 2014, co-editor of Oxford Poetry, and their fiction, non-fiction, and art has been published in many national and international magazines and newspapers. Bernard's work engages with LGBT identities and dialogues. Bernard believes that celebrations such as LGBT History Month are positive and beneficial, but there needs to be vigilance against those that use it for their own agendas.
Kerry Young is a British writer, born in Jamaica. She is the author of three well received and interlinked novels: Pao (2011), Gloria (2013) and Show Me a Mountain (2016).
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