James Wood (critic)
| James Wood | |
|---|---|
| Born |
1 November 1965 Durham, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | Chorister School, Durham |
| Alma mater | Eton College Jesus College, Cambridge |
| Genre | critic |
| Notable awards | Young Journalist of the Year Berlin Prize Fellowship |
James Douglas Graham Wood (born 1 November 1965 in Durham, England) is an English-American literary critic, essayist and novelist. As of 2014[update], he is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine.
Born to Dennis William Wood (born 1928), a Dagenham-born minister and professor of zoology at Durham University, and Sheila Graham Wood, née Lillia, a schoolteacher from Scotland, Wood was raised in Durham in an evangelical wing of the Church of England, an environment he describes as austere and serious. He was educated at Durham Chorister School and Eton College, both on music scholarships. He read English Literature at Jesus College, Cambridge, where in 1988 he graduated with a First.
After Cambridge, Wood "holed up in London in a vile house in Herne Hill, and started trying to make it as a reviewer". His career began reviewing books for The Guardian. In 1990 he won Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards. From 1991 to 1995 Wood was the chief literary critic of The Guardian, and in 1994 served as a judge for the Booker Prize for fiction. In 1995 he became a senior editor at The New Republic in the United States. In 2007 Wood left his role at The New Republic to become a staff writer at The New Yorker. Wood's reviews and essays have appeared frequently in The New York Times, The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books where he is a member of its editorial board. He is also on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College. He was a recipient of the 2010/2011 Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin.
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