Peter Kemp is the Sunday Times’s Chief Fiction Reviewer and has been writing for the paper for forty years. He was its Fiction Editor from 1994 to 2010 and was a theatre reviewer for the Independent from its launch in 1987 to 1991. He lectures widely, particularly on C19th, C20th and C21st literature, is a frequent speaker at literary festivals in Britain and overseas, and often broadcasts for the BBC, having contributed most regularly to Radio 4’s art programmes, 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 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 Harbour (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.
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