Our People

Mr Peter Kemp

Fellow, Visiting Fellow

Peter Kemp is the Chief Fiction Reviewer for the Sunday Times and was also the paper’s Fiction Editor from 1994 to 2010. He is a frequent speaker at literary festivals in Britain and overseas and has regularly broadcast on BBC programmes such as Open Book, Saturday Review and Front Row.

He has been a judge for numerous literary awards, among them the Booker Prize, the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, the Betty Trask Award, the Geoffrey Faber Prize for Fiction, the Encore Award, the Society of Authors’ European Literature Prize, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. He is a member of the Booker Prize Advisory Committee and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, whose Council he has also served on. He has been a Visiting Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford, from 1995.

His books include Muriel Spark (1974), H.G. Wells and the Culminating Ape (1982, updated edition 1996), and a study of Edith Wharton (1994). He is the editor of The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations (1997, revised and expanded edition 2003) and an Associate Editor of The Oxford Companion to English Literature (2009).

His book about fiction in English of the past fifty years, Retroland, will be published by Yale University Press in October 2023.