Tobias Jones is a British author, journalist, teacher and community-builder. He was educated at Jesus College, Oxford, and then worked at the London Review of Books and the Independent on Sunday . He has written various works of fiction and non-fiction, and appears regularly on British and Italian TV and Radio. He lives in Parma in Italy.
His first book, The Dark Heart of Italy was a bestseller in Britain, Italy and the United States. Following its publication, he was short-listed for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award. [1]
In January 2007 he published his second book Utopian Dreams (Faber & Faber) after a year spent travelling with his wife Francesca and first daughter Benedetta across five communities in Britain and Italy. The book was featured on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week as well as being Book of the Week on that network.
Jones' third non-fiction book, Blood on the Altar , is a real-life mystery about the disappearance of Elisa Claps, a teenager murdered in a church in Potenza in 1993. The case took nearly 20 years to be solved, in which time her family came up against a corrupt church, organised crime and the chronic indifference of the authorities. It was only when a housewife over a thousand miles away in Bournemouth, England, was brutally murdered that the net finally closed in on Danilo Restivo, a hair fetishist from Potenza. Blood on the Altar was long-listed for the Gordon Burn prize. [2]
A Place of Refuge was the story of Windsor Hill Wood, a Somerset sanctuary for people going through a period of crisis in their lives. Jones and his wife co-founded the community and lived there for eight years. The book tells the story of the highs and lows of sharing a house and all meals, farm chores and therapies, with a very diverse group of people.
His fifth non-fiction book, Ultra, is about Italy’s passionate, sometimes violent football fans, the Ultras. It traces the iconic subculture from its beginnings in the late 1960s up to the present day. The book won the CLOC/Daily Telegraph Football Book of the Year [3] award in 2020.
In 2022, Jones published his book, The Po: An elegy for Italy's longest river, an environmental and historical examination of the Po. [4]
The Salati Case was the first in a series of crime novels featuring Castagnetti, a bee-keeping private detective in northern Italy. [5] The second Castagnetti crime novel, White Death, was published in 2011. The Third Castagnetti novel, Death of a Showgirl , came out in 2013. [6]
Jones has written and presented three TV series for Rai, the Italian state broadcaster: Ricchi d’Italia, Cervelli d’Italia and Travelogue: Destinazione Italia. He has also written various documentaries for BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4. Blood on the Altar and Ultra have both been optioned by film companies, as has Jones’s Guardian Long Read about the disappearance of Yara Gambirasio.
Jones is a regular contributor to the British and Italian press. He has previously been a columnist for the Observer and for Internazionale. A selection of his investigative and opinion pieces can be found below:
In 2009, Jones co-founded Windsor Hill Wood with his wife. Now a registered charity, WHW has been managed by a new family since Jones moved back to Italy in 2017.
In 2016, Jones and his wife co-founded another charity and woodland community, this time non-residential: Shepton Mallet Community Woodland.
Jones has taught at various universities. Formerly a Visiting Fellow of Creative Non-Fiction at UEA, he was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Exeter University for two years. He now teaches journalism at Parma University.
He regularly leads creative writing workshops for the Arvon Foundation, and for a variety of schools, prisons, charities etc. Jones often does gigs at literary and music festivals.
Sir William Gerald Golding was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954), he published another twelve volumes of fiction in his lifetime. In 1980, he was awarded the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage, the first novel in what became his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth. He was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Simon Anthony Lee Brett OBE FRSL is a British author of detective fiction, a playwright, and a producer-writer for television and radio. As an author, he is best known for his mystery series featuring Charles Paris, Mrs Pargeter, Fethering, and Blotto & Twinks. His radio credits have included The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue and Just a Minute.
Simon of Trent, also known as Simeon (1472–1475), was a young boy and believed murder victim from the city of Trent, in the Prince-Bishopric of Trent, whose disappearance and death was blamed on the leaders of the city's Jewish community, based on the confessions of Jews obtained under judicial torture.
John Andrew Sutherland is a British academic, newspaper columnist and author. He is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London.
Louise Doughty is the author of nine novels, five plays for radio and a TV mini-series. Her most recent book is Platform Seven (2019), currently being adapted as a four-part drama. The previous book, Black Water, (2016) was nominated as one of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year and the book before that was the bestseller Apple Tree Yard (2013), which has been published or is being translated into thirty languages and adapted into a highly successful television series adapted by Amanda Coe for BBC One starring Emily Watson.
Sir Ronald Harwood was a South African-born British author, playwright, and screenwriter, best known for his plays for the British stage as well as the screenplays for The Dresser and The Pianist, for which he won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He was nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007).
Jo Shapcott FRSL is an English poet, editor and lecturer who has won the National Poetry Competition, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Costa Book of the Year Award, a Forward Poetry Prize and the Cholmondeley Award.
Jon Savage is an English writer, broadcaster and music journalist, best known for his history of the Sex Pistols and punk music, England's Dreaming, published in 1991.
The Iron Man: A Children's Story in Five Nights is a 1968 science fiction novel by British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, first published by Faber and Faber in the UK with illustrations by George Adamson. Described by some as a modern fairy tale, it narrates the unexpected arrival in England of a giant "metal man" of unknown origin who rains destruction on the countryside by eating industrial farm equipment, before befriending a small boy and defending the world from a dragon from outer space. Expanding the narrative beyond a criticism of warfare and inter-human conflict, Hughes later wrote a sequel, The Iron Woman (1993), describing retribution based on environmental themes related to pollution.
The Last King of Scotland is a novel by journalist Giles Foden, published by Faber and Faber in 1998. Focusing on the rise of Ugandan President Idi Amin and his reign as dictator from 1971 to 1979, the novel, which interweaves fiction and historical fact, is written as the memoir of a fictional Scottish doctor in Amin's employ. Foden's novel received critical acclaim and numerous awards when it was published. In 2006, a loose eponymous film adaptation was released.
Piers Paul Read FRSL is a British novelist, historian and biographer. He was first noted in 1974 for a book of reportage, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, later adapted as a feature film and a documentary. Read was educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he studied history.
Vikram Chandra is an Indian-American writer. His first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, won the 1996 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book.
Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet, translator, and critic. The Guardian has described him as "arguably the world's most influential translator of German into English".
Frank Scalice, also known as "Don Ciccio" and "Wacky", was an Italian-American mobster active in New York City, who led the future Gambino crime family from 1930 to 1931. He was consigliere from 1931 until his murder on June 17, 1957.
Andrew Martin is an English novelist, documentary maker, journalist and musician.
Yara Gambirasio was a 13-year-old Italian girl killed on the evening of 26 November 2010.
Tarzan: The Greystoke Legacy is a 2011 young adult novel by Andy Briggs that reboots the Tarzan book series to the present day. The novel was published in the United Kingdom by Faber and Faber, and in the United States by Open Road Media. It has also been distributed in Canada.
Daniel Gwynne Jones is a British historian, TV presenter, and journalist. He was educated at The Royal Latin School, a state grammar school in Buckingham, before attending Pembroke College, Cambridge.
Danilo Restivo is an Italian double murderer. Restivo is serving a life sentence with a 40-year tariff for murdering his neighbour Heather Barnett in 2002. Investigators' suspicions that Restivo had murdered Barnett were raised because of his alleged involvement in the 1993 disappearance of Elisa Claps in Potenza, Italy, but he was not charged due to insufficient evidence. Subsequent to the 2010 discovery of Claps's body, Restivo was tried for the murder of Barnett, with evidence of similarities in ritualistic placing of hair on the bodies of Claps and Barnett being heard by the English court. He was found guilty of murdering Barnett, and later found guilty in his absence for murdering Claps by an Italian court.
Jong-Ok Shin was a Korean English language student living in Bournemouth, United Kingdom. She was murdered in the early hours of the morning of 12 July 2002 as she walked home from a night out with friends. Omar Benguit was arrested for the murder of Jong-Ok Shin on 22 August 2002, by Dorset Police, and was later convicted after a second re-trial in 2005 at Winchester Crown Court. Benguit was sentenced to life imprisonment and has had two failed attempts at the Court of Appeal. His first appeal was in 2005 and second was in 2014. He now remains at a category A prison in England and still maintains his innocence.
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