John Ryle

From 2001 to 2017 Ryle was successively chair and executive director of the Rift Valley Institute, a research and public information organisation operating in Eastern Africa that he founded with Jok Madut Jok and Philip Winter. He was a member of the International Eminent Persons Group reporting on slavery and abduction in Sudan. Since 2007 he has been Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology at Bard College, a liberal arts college in New York state. He is a board member of the Human Rights Watch Africa Division and has also served on the boards of the Media Development Investment Fund and the scholarly journal African Affairs.

In the late 1980s Ryle was a project officer at the Ford Foundation in Brazil and lived in an Afro-Brazllian community in Salvador da Bahia. In the 1990s he worked as a consultant to relief and development organisations in Sudan and the Horn of Africa including Save the Children Fund (UK). His weekly newspaper column, City of Words, appeared in The Guardian from 1995 to 1999. From 1996 to 1997 he was a research fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. In the 1990s he became an activist in the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

Ryle was educated at Shrewsbury School and Oxford University, where he graduated in English Language and Literature. He pursued postgraduate studies in social anthropology, conducting fieldwork among the Agar Dinka communities in South Sudan. In 1975 he became an assistant editor at the Times Literary Supplement. During the printers' strike at Times Newspapers he founded, with Richard Boston, the acclaimed but short-lived periodical Quarto (1978–1981). From 1982 to 1986 he worked for the Sunday Times in London as Deputy Literary Editor and, subsequently, as a feature writer. He has written for the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times and various scholarly periodicals, and is a contributing editor of Granta.