Lynne Walker

Who is Lynne Walker?

Lynne Walker was a British music and theatre critic who also had experience as a broadcaster.

Born in Edinburgh, she attended the Mary Erskine School. She won a medal at the end of her time at Napier College in 1976, and gained a degree from the Huddersfield School of Music. It was at this time that Walker became drawn to the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and gained a scholarship to study choral conducting in France under Arthur Oldham.

Her early career was as a musician, but she migrated to marketing and publicity in the early 1980s working for the Scottish National Orchestra and later for the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester. In 1991 she began her own editorial consultancy Edgewise with the music critic Gerald Larner, whom she had married in 1989. Simultaneously she had begun a freelance career in journalism and broadcasting. For about a decade, until the programme was dropped in 1998, she was a contributor to of the BBC Radio 4 arts magazine Kaleidoscope. She also hosted the Radio 3 programme In Tune.

By 2000 she was a more regular contributor to The Independent, responsible for the newspaper's coverage of theatre events at the Edinburgh Festival, feature articles and arts criticism with an emphasis on the north of England.