John Sutherland (author) facts for kids

John Andrew Sutherland (born 9 October 1938) is a British academic, newspaper columnist and author. He is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London.

Biography

After graduating from the University of Leicester in 1964, Sutherland gained a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, where he began his academic career as an assistant lecturer. He specialises in Victorian fiction, 20th-century literature, and the history of publishing. Among his works of scholarship is the Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (known in the US as Stanford Companion, 1989), a comprehensive encyclopaedia of Victorian fiction. A second edition was published in 2009 with 900 biographical entries, synopses of over 600 novels, and extensive background material on publishers, reviewers, and readers.

Apart from writing regularly for The Guardian newspaper, Sutherland has published a number of books of literary scholarship and is editing the forthcoming Oxford Companion to Popular Fiction. The series of books which starts with Is Heathcliff a Murderer? has brought him a wide readership. The books in the series are collections of essays about classic fiction from the Victorian period. Carefully going over the text, Sutherland highlights apparent inconsistencies, anachronisms and oversights, and explains references which the modern reader is likely to overlook. In some cases, he demonstrates the likelihood that the author simply forgot a minor detail. In others, apparent slips on the part of the author are presented as evidence that something is going on below the surface of the book which is not explicitly described (such as his explanation for why Sherlock Holmes should mis-address Miss Stoner as Miss Roylott in "The Adventure of the Speckled Band").

In 2004, he published a biography of Stephen Spender. In 2005, he was involved in Dot Mobile's project to translate summaries and quotes of classic literature into text messaging shorthand. In the same year, he was also Chair of Judges for the Man Booker Prize. In 2007, he published an autobiography, The Boy Who Loved Books. The same year, his annotated edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Black Arrow was released by Penguin Books. In 2011, he published Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives, an 800-page book containing 294 idiosyncratic sketches of famous and lesser-known novelists selected from the past 400 years.

He has also provided the forewords and introductions to a number of titles in the Oxford World's Classics series; for authors such as William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope and Wilkie Collins. Similarly for various titles published by Penguin Classics, the Folio Society and others. A number of his earlier books have the author as "J. Sutherland" or "J. A. Sutherland", and should not be confused with the scholar James R. Sutherland who was also a Lord Northcliffe Professor.