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{{short description|British journalist and writer (1945–2022)}}{{about||the British academic|Ian Jack (literary scholar)|the Australian historian|R. Ian Jack}}{{Use dmy dates|date=October 2022}}{{Use British English|date=March 2012}}

factoids

|birth_place = Farnworth, Lancashire, England2022282df=yes}}|death_place = Paisley, Renfrewshire, ScotlandJournalistauthor}}|years_active = 1965–2022

• {{marriage|Aparna Bagchi|1979|1992|end = divorced{edih}
• {{marriage|Rosalind Sharpe|1998}}

}}|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,{{Who's Who | title=JACK, Ian Grant | id = U21610 | volume = 2022 | edition = online}} 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,BOOK, Jack, Ian, The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain, 11 January 2011, Random House, 978-1-4464-4809-0, 5,weblink en, ...my mother moved to Hill of Beath aged 2 or 3 ..., and his father Henry was born in Dunfermline. The family returned to Scotland when he was seven, in 1952.NEWS, Ian Jack, Guardian columnist and former Granta editor, dies aged 77,weblink Harriet, Sherwood, 29 October 2022, 29 October 2022, The Guardian, London, WEB, 10 September 2022, They say the Queen was crowned in a different country. But some things in Britain never change {{!, Ian Jack |url=https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/10/queen-crowned-britain-change |access-date=11 September 2022 |website=the Guardian |language=en}} 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,WEB, Ian Jack,weblink 29 October 2022, Booker Prize, Jack joined The Glasgow Herald as a trainee journalist in 1965. After a short spell in its head office he was sent to work on two weekly papers in Lanarkshire, the now-defunct Cambuslang Advertiser and the East Kilbride News.NEWS, Amid the overalls and the flat caps, I found my voice in Cambuslang,weblink Ian, Jack, 30 March 2019, 29 October 2022, The Guardian, London, Later he worked for the Scottish Daily Express at its Glasgow offices.NEWS, The SRB Interview: Ian Jack,weblink 14 October 2009, 29 October 2022, Scottish Review of Books, 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,MAGAZINE, Jack, Ian,weblink Ian Jack, Vanity Fair, 7 May 1986, 20 March 2016, and then joined the team that created The Independent on Sunday, which he edited from 1991 to 1995.WEB, Oliver Luft,weblink Timeline: a history of the Independent newspapers – from City Road to Kensington via 'Reservoir Dogs' | Media, The Guardian, 28 November 2008, 20 March 2016, WEB,weblink Ian Jack – Literature, Literature.britishcouncil.org, 20 March 2016, His editorship of the quarterly Granta magazine, to which he had previously contributed as a writer, spanned 47 issues over twelve years to 2007.WEB,weblink Ian Jack, Granta, 20 March 2016, 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.WEB,weblink Ian Jack, The Guardian, 21 May 2014, 20 March 2016, He occasionally taught at the India Institute, King's College London.WEB,weblink King's College London Ian Jack, King's College London, 20 March 2016, In 2009, Jack published a collection of essays and previously unpublished writings entitled The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain.WEB,weblink Home, Randomhouse.co.uk, 20 March 2016, NEWS, Foden, Giles, Giles Foden, The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain by Ian Jack {{!, Book review |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/oct/03/country-formerly-known-ian-jack |access-date=29 October 2022 |work=The Guardian |date=2 October 2009 |language=en}} 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."WEB,weblink The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain by Ian Jack, Cooke, Rachel, 6 September 2009, 1 November 2010, The Observer, 5 March 2016,weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20160305171517weblink">weblink dead, 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."WEB,weblink A lost civilisation, Chancellor, Alexander, 9 September 2010, 17 October 2010, Spectator Book Club,weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20091026182332weblink">weblink 26 October 2009, dead, 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."NEWS,weblink Goodbye to all that, The Economist, 10 September 2009, 20 March 2016, 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.WEB, RSL Fellows,weblink Royal Society of Literature » Current RSL Fellows, Rsliterature.org, 16 March 2016, 20 March 2016, In 2011, London's National Portrait Gallery purchased a portrait of Jack by photographer Denis Waugh for its permanent collection.WEB, NPG x134847; Ian Jack - portrait,weblink National Portrait Gallery, London, 31 October 2022,

Personal life and death

Jack married Aparna Bagchi in 1979; the couple divorced in 1992. He lived in Highbury, London,NEWS, Blackstock Road plaque honours origins of worldwide peace symbol,weblink Emily, Finch, 12 October 2018, 29 October 2022, The Guardian, London, with his second wife, Lindy Sharpe. They had two children, and spent a part of every year on the Isle of Bute in the Firth of Clyde.NEWS, The big Mac story,weblink Ian, Jack, 10 September 2005, 29 October 2022, The Guardian, London, NEWS, Diary – Alexander Chancellor,weblink Alexander, Chancellor, 27 August 2011, 29 October 2022, The Spectator, Jack's paternal grandmother was born in IndiaBOOK, Jack, Ian, The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain, 11 January 2011, Random House, 978-1-4464-4809-0, 253,weblink Cousin Walter, My great grandfather Birmingham was an Irishman (nobody knew from where, or of what religion) who joined the Royal Artillery and went to India, where most of his children were born, including my father's mother, and lived with his grandfather in the now-demolished mining village of Lassodie, between Dunfermline and Kelty.INTERVIEW, Ian, Jack, Ian Jack, Gordon Brewer, 16/10/2016, Good Morning Scotland – BBC Radio Scotland,weblink Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 16 October 2016, 16 October 2016, WEB,weblink We know the terrible legacy of our love of fossil fuels. But will it stop us? No chance, Ian, Jack, 11 November 2011, The Guardian, Jack died in Paisley, Renfrewshire, on 28 October 2022, after a short illness, aged 77.

Bibliography as author

• BOOK, Jack, Ian, Before the Oil Ran Out: Britain 1977–86, Secker & Warburg, 1987, London, 0-436-22020-2,
• BOOK, Jack, Ian, The Crash that Stopped Britain, 2001, Granta, London, 1-86207-468-2, 2, (originally from Granta 73)
• BOOK, Jack, Ian, The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain, 2009, Jonathan Cape, London, 978-0-224-08735-3, 2,
• BOOK, Jack, Ian, Mofussil Junction, 2013, Penguin Books, Penguin, New Delhi, 978-0-670-08644-3, 2,

Bibliography as editor/contributor

• BOOK, Athill, Diana, Life Class: The Selected Memoirs of Diana Athill, Granta, 2009, London, 9781847081469, Introduction by Ian Jack.WEB, Diana, Athill,weblink Life Class &124; What's New, Granta Books, 7 October 2010, 20 March 2016,
• BOOK, Chaudhuri, Nirad, The Autobiography of An Unknown Indian, New York Review of Books Classics, 2001, New York, 9780940322820,weblink Introduction by Ian Jack.WEB,weblink The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, Nirad C. Chaudhuri – New York Review Books, Nyrb.com, 30 September 2001, 20 March 2016,
• BOOK, Jack, Ian, Granta 130 India: Another Way of Seeing, Granta, 2015, London, 9781905881857, WEB,weblink Granta 130: India - Granta Magazine, Granta, 20 March 2016,
• BOOK, Jack, Ian, The Granta Book of India, Granta/Grove Press, 2005, London, 9781862077843,weblink BOOK, Ian Jack, The Granta Book of India (9781862077843): Ian Jack: Books, 2004, Granta, 1862077843, registration,weblink
• BOOK, Jack, Ian, The Granta Book of Reportage, Granta, 1998, London, 9781862071933,weblink BOOK, Ian, Jack, The Granta Book of Reportage: Ian Jack: 9781862071933: Amazon.com: Books, 1998, Granta Books, 1862071934, registration,weblink
• BOOK, Jack, Ian, The Granta Book of Travel, Granta, 1998, London, 978-1862071100, BOOK, Ian Jack (Introduction), The Granta Book of Travel (Import): Ian Jack: 9781862071100: Amazon.com: Books, 1998, Granta Books, 1862071101,
• BOOK, Malcolm, Janet, The Journalist and the Murderer, Granta, 2004, London, 9781862076372, Introduction by Ian Jack.WEB, Janet Malcolm,weblink The Journalist and the Murderer &124; What's New, Granta Books, 20 March 2016,
• BOOK, Jack, Ian, Before the Oil Ran Out: Britain, 1976–86, Secker & Warburg, 1987, BOOK, Before the Oil Ran Out: Britain, 1976–86,weblink Secker & Warburg, 1987, Jack, Ian,

References

{{Reflist}}

External links

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{{The Independent editors}}{{Authority control}}