Brian Morton

Who is Brian Morton?

Brian Morton is a Scottish writer, journalist and broadcaster, mainly specialising in jazz and modern literature. Born in Paisley, near Glasgow and raised in Dunoon, Morton was educated at Edinburgh University and taught in the late 1970s at the University of East Anglia and the University of Tromsø in Norway.

A former literary editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement and contributor to The Times, he went freelance about 1992, returning to a Scottish base at around the same time.

From 1992 to 1997 Morton was the main presenter of Impressions for Radio 3, a fortnightly Jazz and improvised music programme. For more than a decade Morton was a familiar voice on music programmes and features on other arts related subjects on the London based BBC networks. For some years he was the presenter and producer of The Usual Suspects, subsequently The Brian Morton Show on BBC Radio Scotland, until 2003 when he resigned after criticising the BBC's art coverage. He currently writes and farms on the West of Scotland, with his wife, landscape photographer Sarah MacDonald. They have one son. Morton also has two older daughters.

He is co-author of The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings, whose ninth edition was published at the end of October 2008. He is also the author of The Blackwell Guide to Recorded Contemporary Music, which covers modern classical music. Morton was a frequent contributor to Jazz Review magazine, and was briefly editor in 2008; the magazine was absorbed by Jazz Journal in 2009, for which Morton has written. He is a long-standing contributor to The Wire and to the Catholic weekly The Tablet. Morton converted to Catholicism in 1984.