Patrick Wright

Patrick Wright is a British writer, broadcaster and academic in the fields of cultural studies and cultural history. He was educated at the University of Kent and Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.

He is Professor (emeritus) of Literature, History and Politics at King's College London, having previously worked at the Institute of Cultural Analysis of Nottingham Trent University, and as a fellow of the London Consortium. In the 1980s he worked for the National Council for Voluntary Organisations in London, and was self-employed as a writer, broadcaster and occasional consultant between 1987 and 2000. He has written for many journals and newspapers, including The Guardian, where he was a contracted feature writer in the early 1990s. More recently, he has held a Mellon Fellowship at Tate Britain and, together with Timothy Hyman, curated a major Stanley Spencer exhibition. He presented a BBC2 series The River, about the River Thames, in 1999. Patrick Wright is a former presenter of Radio 3's arts programme Night Waves. He is also known for his work on British heritage.

He is the author of several books, many of which explore themes connected to England and Englishness, Psychogeography and cultural history, including The Village That Died for England and A Journey through Ruins: The Last Days of London. His latest book, The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness, explores the East German writer Uwe Johnson and his unexpected residence on the Isle of Sheppey between 1974 and his death in 1984, taking his appreciation of "backwaters" as the basis for a consideration of deindustrialisation and its more recent consequences in England and elsewhere. It is published in December 2020 by Repeater Books.

Honours and recognition

Wright was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2016 and of the Royal Society of Literature in 2025.