John Sutherland (author)

In 2001, he published Last Drink to LA, a chronicle of his alcoholism, drug addiction, and return to sobriety. 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, despite having caused some controversy in 1999 when he revealed details of disagreements between his fellow judges in his Guardian column. 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.

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.

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.