Ian Jack

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British journalist and writer (1945–2022)

title: "Ian Jack" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["1945-births", "2022-deaths", "people-from-farnworth", "20th-century-british-journalists", "20th-century-british-male-writers", "21st-century-british-journalists", "21st-century-british-male-journalists", "21st-century-british-male-writers", "british-essayists", "british-foreign-correspondents", "british-people-of-scottish-descent", "fellows-of-the-royal-society-of-literature", "granta-people", "people-associated-with-fife", "people-educated-at-dunfermline-high-school", "the-guardian-people", "the-herald-(glasgow)-people", "the-independent-on-sunday-editors", "the-observer-people", "the-sunday-times-people"] description: "British journalist and writer (1945–2022)" topic_path: "arts" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Jack" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary British journalist and writer (1945–2022) ::

::data[format=table title="infobox person"]

FieldValue
nameIan Jack
honorific_suffixFRSL
imagePalFest 2008- Ian Jack (cropped).jpg
captionJack and Brigid Keenan at PalFest 2008
birth_date
birth_placeFarnworth, Lancashire, England
death_date
death_placePaisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland
educationDunfermline High School
occupation
years_active1965–2022
spouse{{plainlist
* {{marriageAparna Bagchi
children2
::

|name = Ian Jack |honorific_suffix = FRSL |image = PalFest 2008- Ian Jack (cropped).jpg |caption = Jack and Brigid Keenan at PalFest 2008 |birth_date = |birth_place = Farnworth, Lancashire, England |death_date = |death_place = Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland |education = Dunfermline High School |occupation = |years_active = 1965–2022 |spouse = {{plainlist|

|children = 2

Ian Grant Jack FRSL (7 February 1945 – 28 October 2022) was a British reporter, writer and editor. He edited the Independent on Sunday, the literary magazine Granta and wrote regularly for The Guardian.

Early life

Jack was born in Farnworth, Lancashire, on 7 February 1945, to parents who had migrated from Fife in 1930. Jack's mother, Isabella (née Gillespie), was born in Kirkcaldy and brought up in Hill of Beath, and his father Henry was born in Dunfermline. The family returned to Scotland when he was seven years old, in 1952. He grew up in North Queensferry and was educated there and at Dunfermline High School.

Career

After a false start as a would-be librarian, Jack joined The Glasgow Herald as a trainee journalist in 1965. Later he worked for the Scottish Daily Express at its Glasgow offices. In 1970, he joined The Sunday Times in London, where he became a section editor and then a foreign correspondent-cum-feature writer with a special interest in South Asia and particularly India, which he began to visit in the mid-1970s. From 1986 to 1989, he wrote for The Observer and Vanity Fair, and then joined the team that created The Independent on Sunday, which he edited from 1991 to 1995. His editorship of the quarterly Granta magazine, to which he had previously contributed as a writer, spanned 47 issues over twelve years to 2007. While at Granta, Jack also commissioned and edited books by Diana Athill, Simon Gray, Janet Malcolm and Travis Elborough, among others. He contributed regularly to The Guardian from 2001, and began to write a weekly column for the paper six years later. He occasionally taught at the India Institute, King's College London.

In 2009, Jack published a collection of essays and previously 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." The Economist wrote: "At the heart of the book are three magnificent essays, about the Hatfield train crash of 2000; the sinking of the Titanic and the film Titanic (1997); and the lost cinemas of Farnworth, Mr Jack's home town, which is also a circuitous epitaph for a lost brother. His contributions to 'this unequal struggle to preserve and remember' cumulatively transcend journalism and attain the status of literature."

Jack's awards included Journalist of the Year (Granada TV's What the Papers Say award, 1985), Reporter of the Year (British Press Awards, 1988) and Editor of the Year (Newspaper Industry Awards, 1993). He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

In 2011, London's National Portrait Gallery purchased a portrait of Jack by photographer Denis Waugh for its permanent collection.

Personal life and death

Jack married Aparna Bagchi in 1979; the couple divorced in 1992. with his second wife, Lindy Sharpe.

Jack's paternal grandmother was born in India and lived with his grandfather in the now-demolished mining village of Lassodie, between Dunfermline and Kelty.{{cite interview | first =Ian | last =Jack | subject-link = Ian Jack | interviewer =Gordon Brewer | title =16/10/2016, Good Morning Scotland – BBC Radio Scotland | url = http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07y79c7 | work =Good Morning Scotland | publisher = BBC Radio Scotland | date =16 October 2016 | access-date =16 October 2016

Jack died in Paisley, Renfrewshire, on 28 October 2022, after a short illness, aged 77.

Bibliography as author

  • (originally from Granta 73)

Bibliography as editor/contributor

  • Introduction by Ian Jack.
  • Introduction by Ian Jack.
  • Introduction by Ian Jack.

References

References

  1. "JACK, Ian Grant".
  2. (11 January 2011). "The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain". Random House.
  3. Sherwood, Harriet. (29 October 2022). "Ian Jack, Guardian columnist and former Granta editor, dies aged 77". The Guardian.
  4. Jack, Ian. (10 September 2022). "They say the Queen was crowned in a different country. But some things in Britain never change". The Guardian.
  5. "Ian Jack". [[Booker Prize]].
  6. Jack, Ian. (30 March 2019). "Amid the overalls and the flat caps, I found my voice in Cambuslang". The Guardian.
  7. (14 October 2009). "The SRB Interview: Ian Jack".
  8. Jack, Ian. (7 May 1986). "Ian Jack".
  9. Oliver Luft. (28 November 2008). "Timeline: a history of the Independent newspapers – from City Road to Kensington via 'Reservoir Dogs' | Media". The Guardian.
  10. "Ian Jack – Literature". Literature.britishcouncil.org.
  11. "Ian Jack". Granta.
  12. (21 May 2014). "Ian Jack". The Guardian.
  13. "King's College London Ian Jack". King's College London.
  14. "Home". Randomhouse.co.uk.
  15. (2 October 2009). "The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain by Ian Jack {{!}} Book review". The Guardian.
  16. Cooke, Rachel. (6 September 2009). "The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain by Ian Jack". The Observer.
  17. Chancellor, Alexander. (9 September 2010). "A lost civilisation". Spectator Book Club.
  18. (10 September 2009). "Goodbye to all that". The Economist.
  19. RSL Fellows. (16 March 2016). "Royal Society of Literature » Current RSL Fellows". Rsliterature.org.
  20. "NPG x134847; Ian Jack - portrait".
  21. Chancellor, Alexander. (27 August 2011). "Diary – Alexander Chancellor".
  22. (11 January 2011). "The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain". Random House.
  23. Jack, Ian. (11 November 2011). "We know the terrible legacy of our love of fossil fuels. But will it stop us? No chance". The Guardian.
  24. Athill, Diana. (7 October 2010). "Life Class | What's New". Granta Books.
  25. (30 September 2001). "The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, Nirad C. Chaudhuri – New York Review Books". Nyrb.com.
  26. "Granta 130: India - Granta Magazine". Granta.
  27. (2004). "The Granta Book of India (9781862077843): Ian Jack: Books". Granta.
  28. (1998). "The Granta Book of Reportage: Ian Jack: 9781862071933: Amazon.com: Books". Granta Books.
  29. Ian Jack (Introduction). (1998). "The Granta Book of Travel (Import): Ian Jack: 9781862071100: Amazon.com: Books". Granta Books.
  30. Malcolm, Janet. "The Journalist and the Murderer | What's New". Granta Books.
  31. Jack, Ian. (1987). "Before the Oil Ran Out: Britain, 1976–86". Secker & Warburg.

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