Ian Jack

Who is Ian Jack?

Ian Jack is a Scottish journalist who was the editor of the literary magazine Granta from 1995 to 2007. Granta 98 "The Deep End" was the 48th issue which he edited and the last.

Jack was educated at Dunfermline High School. After working on several newspaper in Scotland in the 1960s, he was a journalist at The Sunday Times from 1970 to 1986, working as a reporter, editor, feature writer and foreign correspondent in India, from where he covered the Indian Subcontinent and regional hotspots including Afghanistan. Between 1977 and 1989, he lived mainly in Calcutta,and New Delhi.

He was a co-founder of the Independent on Sunday in 1989 and edited the paper from 1991 to 1995, when he joined Granta as its editor, staying in that post until May 2007. A contributor to The Guardian for many years, Jack currently writes a weekly column and other articles for the newspaper. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009. He also writes periodically for the Telegraph.

In 2009, Jack published a collection of essays and unpublished writings entitled The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain. One reviewer wrote of Jack's handling of time in this book: "He is up there with a fiction writer such as Alice Munro in his grasp of its ebb and flow, his awareness that its strong but rapidly changing currents often leave us wondering not only what we can remember, but what we should." Alexander Chancellor called the book "superb", and added: "Collections of columns and newspaper articles are not usually a very good idea. They quickly become stale and dated, and one sometimes wonders what the point of them is except to deceive journalists into thinking that their ephemeral scribblings deserve some permanence. Jack is an exception to the rule."