Biography of James Fenton

He was educated at the Durham Choristers' School, Repton and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry. He has worked as a political and literary journalist on the New Statesman; was a freelance reporter in Indo-China; spent a year in Germany working for The Guardian; was theatre critic for The Sunday Times for five years; chief book reviewer for The Times from 1984 to 1986; South East Asian correspondent for The Independent from 1986 to 1988 and a columnist for them until 1995. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. James Fenton was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1983 and he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1994 to 1999. He is currently writing a play for the Royal Shakespeare Company, has just edited the Faber Book of Love Poetry and his new book, SCHOOL OF GENIUS: A HISTORY OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS has just been published.