John Ryle (writer)

John R. Ryle
John Ryle teaching on Rift Valley Institute Sudans Course
Born	Shrewsbury, Shropshire, United Kingdom
Occupation	Writer, anthropologist, film-maker, editor
Nationality	British
Genre	Ethnography, reportage, essays, literary criticism
Subject	Eastern Africa, Brazil, Human Rights, Religion, Visual Arts, Music and Literature

John Rowland Ryle is a British writer, anthropologist and specialist in Eastern Africa. He is co-founder of the Rift Valley Institute, and Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology at Bard College, NY.

His father, John Creagh Ryle, a doctor and alpinist, was a general practitioner in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, where Ryle was born. His mother, Melody Ryle, née Jackson, was a stalwart of the local Family Planning Association and a noted amateur botanist and gardener. Ryle is a grandson of the pioneer of social medicine John Alfred Ryle, a nephew of the astronomer Sir Martin Ryle, a great-nephew of the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, and a great-great grandson of John Charles Ryle, evangelical Bishop of Liverpool in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Ryle was educated at Shrewsbury School and Oxford University, where he graduated in English Language and Literature. He pursued postgraduate studies in social anthropology, conducting fieldwork among the Agar Dinka communities in South Sudan. In 1975 he became an assistant editor at the Times Literary Supplement. During the printers' strike at Times Newspapers he founded, with Richard Boston, the acclaimed but short-lived periodical Quarto (1978–1981). From 1982 to 1986 he worked for the Sunday Times in London as Deputy Literary Editor and, subsequently, as a feature writer. He has written for the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times and various scholarly periodicals, and is a contributing editor of Granta.