Ian Thomson (writer)

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)

Photo of Ian Thomson, English writer born in London in 1961, best known for his biography, Primo Levi (2002), and reportage, The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica (2009)

Biography

Ian Thomson was born in London in 1961. His parents moved to New York 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 seventeen.) Thomson was educated at Dulwich College, then at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he read English. Subsequently 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.

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 ten years to write and is seen today as the definitive life of the Italian writer and concentration camp survivor. It won the Royal Society of Literature’s W. H.Heinemann Award and was shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly′s Wingate Literary Prize and the Koret Jewish Book Award.

In 2005 Ian Thomson went back to the West Indies to write the The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica (2009),[2][3] seen now as one of the most controversial books written on Jamaica. In 2010 it was awarded the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize[4] as well as the Dolman Travel Book Award. Zadie Smith spoke in Harper’s Magazine of an "excellent book".

Ian 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 travel writers. Ian Thomson has translated the Sicilian crime writer Leonardo Sciascia into English, and has lectured at Columbia University, Princeton University and the Royal Society, London.

He lives in London with his wife and children.

Selected bibliography

Awards and prizes

References

  1. ↑ "Primo, me and C&A". http://www.telegraph.co.uk/''. Retrieved 18 December 2014.
  2. ↑ "Travel writing's new frontiers". The Guardian. Retrieved 18 December 2014.
  3. ↑ Cullen, Miguel. "Ian Thomson: Jamaica was modern before Britain". http://www.independent.co.uk/''. Retrieved 18 December 2014.
  4. ↑ "Ian Thomson wins £10,000 Ondaatje prize". http://www.theguardian.com/''. Retrieved 18 December 2014.
  5. ↑ de Waal, Edmund. "Primo Levi". BBC. Retrieved 18 December 2014.
  6. ↑ "Ian Thomson Non-fiction writer". Royal Literary Fund. Retrieved 18 December 2014.
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