Ian Jack

Ian Jack (born 7 February 1945) is a British journalist and writer who has edited the Independent on Sunday and the literary magazine Granta and now writes regularly for the Guardian.

Jack was born in Farnworth, Lancashire, to parents who had migrated from Fife in 1930. The family returned to Scotland when he was seven, in 1952. He grew up in North Queensferry and was educated there and at Dunfermline High School.

After a false start as a would-be librarian, he joined the Glasgow Herald as a trainee journalist in 1965 and after a short spell in its head office was sent to work on two weekly papers in Lanarkshire, the now-defunct Cambuslang Advertiser and the East Kilbride News. Later he worked for the Scottish Daily Express at its Glasgow offices. In 1970, he joined The Sunday Times in London, where he became a section editor and then a foreign correspondent-cum-feature writer with a special interest in South Asia and particularly India, which he began to visit in the mid 1970s. From 1986 to 1989 he wrote for The Observer and Vanity Fair, and then joined the team that created the Independent on Sunday, which he edited from 1991 to 1995. His editorship of the quarterly Granta magazine, to which he’d previously contributed as a writer, spanned 47 issues over twelve years to 2007. While at Granta, Jack also commissioned and edited books by Diana Athill, Simon Gray, Janet Malcolm and Travis Elborough, among others. He has contributed regularly to the Guardian since 2001 and began to write a weekly column for the paper six years later. He occasionally teaches at the India Institute, King’s College London.

...
Wikipedia