Ian Jack

Ian Jack (born 7 February 1945) 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 Jack 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.

He was a co-founder of the Independent on Sunday in 1989 and edited the paper from 1991 to 1995. He left Granta at the end of May 2007 and now writes regularly for The Guardian. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.

In 2009, Jack published a collection of essays and unpublished writings entitled The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain.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."

Bibliography

• Jack, Ian (1987). Before the Oil Ran Out: Britain 1977-86. London: Secker & Warburg. ISBN 0 436 22020 2. 
•    (2001). The Crash that Stopped Britain. London: Granta. ISBN 1 86207 468 2. 
•    (2009). The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain. London: Jonathan Cape. ISBN 978-0224087353. 

References

Media offices
Preceded by Stephen Glover	Editor of The Independent on Sunday 1991-1995	Succeeded by Peter Wilby
Preceded by Bill Buford	Editor of Granta 1995-2007	Succeeded by Jason Cowley