Peter Kemp.

Peter Kemp is the Sunday Times’s Chief Fiction Reviewer and has been writing for the paper for 40 years.  He was its Fiction Editor from 1994 to 2010 and was a theater reviewer for the Independent from its launch in 1987 to 1991.  He lectures widely, particularly on 19th-century, 20th-century, and 21st-century literature, and he is a frequent speaker at literary festivals in Britain and overseas. He often broadcasts for the BBC, having contributed most regularly to Radio 4’s art programs, Open Book, Front Row and Saturday Review.

He has been a judge for various literary awards, including the Booker Prize, the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, the Betty Trask Award, the Geoffrey Faber Prize for Fiction, the Encore Award, the David Cohen Prize, the Society of Authors’ European Literature Prize, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.  He is a Patron of the Oxford Literary Festival and was a member of the Booker Advisory Committee.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, on whose Council he has also served.  He has been a Visiting Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford since 1995.

His publications include Muriel Spark (Elek, 1974), H.G. Wells and the Culminating Ape (Macmillan, 1982, revised and expanded 1996), and Edith Wharton (BBC, 1994).  He is the editor of The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations (O.U.P., 1997; revised and expanded 2003). He was an Associate Editor with special responsibility for entries on contemporary British fiction for The Oxford Companion to English Literature (seventh edition, 2009), and he has written introductions to books ranging from Graham Greene’s The Human Factor (Everyman’s Library, 1991) to Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbor (Virago, 1995), and Sleep No More (Faber, 2017), a collection of posthumously published short stories by P.D. James (he is also the author of the Dictionary of National Biography’s entry on her life and work).  His latest book, Retroland: A Reader’s Guide to the Dazzling Diversity of Modern Fiction was published by Yale University Press in July 2023.