John Freeman (author)

John Freeman
Freeman at New York book signing, 2013
Born	1974 (age 42–43) Cleveland, Ohio, United States
Alma mater	Swarthmore College

John Freeman (born 1974) is an American writer and a literary critic. He was the editor of the literary magazine Granta until 2013, the former president of the National Book Critics Circle, and his writing has appeared in almost 200 English-language publications around the world, including The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal.

John Freeman was born in Cleveland, Ohio, grew up in New York, Pennsylvania and California, and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1996.

Freeman's first book, The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand Year Journey to Your Inbox, was published in 2009. (It was published in Australia under the title Shrinking the World: The 4,000-year story of how email came to rule our lives.) Freeman's second book, a collection of his interviews with major contemporary writers titled How to Read a Novelist, was published in the US in 2013 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (It was originally published in Australia in 2012.) The book features profiles of Margaret Atwood, John Updike, Geoff Dyer, Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, and others. According to a 2013 interview with Newsmax, Freeman profiled a number of female authors (16 total) in How to Read a Novelist and specifically began the book with Toni Morrison because he thinks “the literary culture is often masculinized. But many of our teachers are women. Often times, if you’re a reader it’s because your mother is a reader—as mine certainly was.”

During his six years on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, Freeman launched a campaign to raise awareness of the cutbacks in book coverage in national print media and to save book review sections.