 | This article needs to be updated.(August 2021) |
Joan Alison Smith | |
|---|---|
 Joan Smith | |
| Born | 27 August 1953 London, England, UK |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | University of Reading |
| Spouse | Francis Wheen (1985–1993) |
| Partner | Denis MacShane (2003–2010) |
Joan Alison Smith (born 27 August 1953) is an English journalist and novelist, who is a former chair of the Writers in Prison committee in the English section of International PEN and was the Executive Director of Hacked Off.
Smith was born 27 August 1953 in London, the daughter of Alan Smith, a park superintendent, and Ann Anita Smith (née Coltman). She attended the Girls’ Grammar School in Stevenage and Basingstoke High School for Girls before reading Latin at the University of Reading in the early 1970s. [1] [2]
After a spell as a journalist in local radio in Manchester, she joined the staff of The Sunday Times in 1979 and stayed at the newspaper until 1984, although Smith still contributes book reviews, usually on crime fiction, to the publication. She has had a regular column in The Guardian's Weekend supplement, also freelancing for the newspaper and has contributed to The Independent , The Independent on Sunday, and the New Statesman .
In her non-fiction Smith displays a commitment to atheism, feminism (Misogynies: Reflections on Myths and Malice, 1989) and republicanism [3] (Down with the Royals, 2015). [4] She is scornful of popular culture and once gave away her television set to her ex-husband, although she acquired a new set almost a decade later.
On 15 September 2010, Smith, along with 54 other public figures, signed an open letter published in The Guardian, stating their opposition to Pope Benedict XVI's state visit to the UK. [5]
In November 2011, she gave evidence to the Leveson Inquiry into press and media standards following the telephone hacking practised by the News of the World . She testified that she considered celebrities thought they could control press content if they put themselves into the public domain when, in reality the opposite was more likely.
Although Smith was opposed to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, disputing the false claims about the Saddam Hussein regime's possession of Weapon of mass destruction, she took a different view during the Syrian civil war. As a consequence of the Syrian refugee crisis, [6] and the 2013 Ghouta attacks using chemical weapons, she called for military intervention. [7]
In 2013, the then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson appointed Smith as a co-chair of the city's Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Board and she continued the role under his successor Sadiq Khan. [8] In 2021, The Times reported on Smith's claim that she had been sacked from the position because of her views on women's rights to single-sex rape and domestic abuse refuges and on reform of the Metropolitan Police and its “endemic misogyny” in the wake of the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer. [9] A City Hall spokesperson said that Smith's post had been discontinued following a systemic review of the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC)'s partnership boards including the VAWG board, adding that, "Joan Smith's expertise and insights on the VAWG board have been valuable and we are grateful for her time and service". [10]
Outside the UK, Smith is probably best known for the Loretta Lawson series of crime novels which were published between 1987 and 1995. What Will Survive (2007) is a novel set in Lebanon in 1997 concerning a journalist's investigation into the death of a model and anti-landmine campaigner.
She is a keen supporter of Classics in state schools, describing the 1997–2010 Labour government's failure to act on the matter as "hardly their finest hour" [1] and is a patron of The Iris Project. Smith is a supporter of the pressure group Republic and a Patron of Humanists UK. [11] In 2015, she was elected chair of Labour Humanists, a group promoting secularist policies and humanist values within the Labour party. [11] She is an honorary associate of the National Secular Society. [12]
Joan Smith was appointed the Executive Director of Hacked Off in late May 2014 in succession to Brian Cathcart. [13] Smith assumed the position in June, [14] but stood down in late June 2015 to return to her writing career full-time. [15]
She is due to publish an account of femicide in ancient Rome by the end of 2024. [16] [17] [18]
Smith was married to journalist Francis Wheen between 1985 and 1993. [2]
After the end of her marriage, Smith started a relationship with Denis MacShane, a British Labour Party politician at the time. On 25 May 2009, during the expenses scandal of 2009 Smith wrote an article for The Guardian titled "I am sick of my country and this hysteria over MPs" [19] objecting to the furore over MPs' expenses which she cited as an example of bullying in public life, stating that her (then) partner was an (unnamed) MP.
The couple subsequently split up in 2010 after seven years together; MacShane was subsequently sentenced to six months of imprisonment for submitting false invoices. [20] [21] [22]
In 2003 she was offered the MBE for her services to PEN, [23] but refused the award. [24] [25] [26]
Nigella Lucy Lawson is an English food writer and television cook.
Herbert Richard Hoggart was an English academic whose career covered the fields of sociology, English literature and cultural studies, with emphasis on British popular culture.
Xuē Xīnrán is a British-Chinese journalist, author, speaker, and advocate for women's issues. She was a popular radio personality in China with a call-in program named "Words on the Night Breeze" from 1989 to 1997. The program focused on women's issues and life stories. She was well known for travelling extensively in China to interview women for her work. In 1997, she moved to London and began writing stories of the women she met along her journeys. Her first book, The Good Women of China, was published in 2002, becoming an international bestseller. She frequently contributes to The Guardian and the BBC.
Jon Savage is an English writer, broadcaster and music journalist, best known for his definitive history of the Sex Pistols and punk music, England's Dreaming (1991).
Lyndall Gordon is a British-based biographical and former academic writer, known for her literary biographies. She is a senior research fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford.
Jason Webster is an Anglo-American author who writes on Spain. He was born in California to British parents in 1970. He has spent most of his adult life in Spain, having settled in Valencia with his Spanish wife, actress and dancer Salud Botella. He is a director of The Scheherazade Foundation.
Gillian Tindall is a British writer and historian. Among her books are City of Gold: The Biography of Bombay (1992) and Celestine: Voices from a French Village (1997). Her novel Fly Away Home won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1972. From the 1960s to the early 1990s, Tindall worked as a journalist, writing stories for The Guardian, the Evening Standard, The Times, and The Independent – and for many years she was a regular guest on the BBC Radio 3 arts discussion programme, Critics' Forum. Since 1963 she has lived in Kentish Town, North London.
Norah Evelyn Smallwood OBE was an English publisher.
Jennifer Sheila Uglow is an English biographer, historian, critic and publisher. She was an editorial director of Chatto & Windus. She has written critically acclaimed biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, and Edward Lear, and a history and joint biography of the Lunar Society, among others, and has also compiled The Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography.
Michael Ogilvie Imlah, better known as Mick Imlah, was a Scottish poet and editor.
Sarah Maguire was a British poet, translator and broadcaster.
Carol Rumens FRSL is a British poet.
Nicholas Davies is a British investigative journalist, writer, and documentary maker.
Paul Anthony Griffiths is a British music critic, novelist and librettist. He is particularly noted for his writings on modern classical music and for having written the libretti for two 20th-century operas, Tan Dun's Marco Polo and Elliott Carter's What Next?.
Matthew Baylis, also known as Matt Baylis and M. H. Baylis, is a British novelist, screenwriter and journalist.
Sarah Bakewell is a British author and professor. She lives in London. She received the Windham–Campbell Literature Prize in Non-Fiction.
Diana Omo Evans FRSL is a British novelist, journalist and critic who was born and lives in London. Evans has written four full-length novels. Her first novel, 26a, published in 2005, won the Orange Award for New Writers, the Betty Trask Award and the deciBel Writer of the Year award. Her third novel Ordinary People was shortlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction and won the 2019 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature. A House for Alice was published in 2023.
(Harriet) Virginia Spencer Cowles was an American journalist, biographer, and travel writer. During her long career, Cowles went from covering fashion, to covering the Spanish Civil War, the turbulent period in Europe leading up to World War II, and the entire war. Her service as a correspondent was recognized by the British government with an OBE in 1947. After the war, she published a number of critically acclaimed biographies of historical figures. In 1983, while traveling with her husband, she was killed in an automobile accident which left him severely injured.
Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media is a 2008 non-fiction book by Nick Davies in which he investigating malpractice on Fleet Street. The Flat Earth News is considered to be the sister book to Davies' 2014 publication, Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught Up with Rupert Murdoch.
George Bitton Jermyn (1789–1857) was an English cleric and antiquarian, known for his topographical and genealogical studies of Suffolk.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Other | |
