Honorary graduates 2018

Robert McCrum (DLitt)

Monday 23 July 2018 10:00am

Robert McCrum, who was born and educated in Cambridge, is a writer and editor whose most recent book, Every Third Thought: On Life, Death and the Endgame, was published by Picador to great acclaim in 2017, when it was also serialised on BBC Radio 4.

From 1980 to 1996, McCrum was editor-in-chief of Faber & Faber, where he published Kazuo Ishiguro, Milan Kundera, Peter Carey, Danilo Kis, Paul Auster, Marilynne Robinson, Lorrie Moore, Adam Phillips, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jayne Anne Phillips, Orhan Pamuk, Adam Mars-Jones, and Hanif Kureishi among many others. At the same time, he wrote seven novels, and co-authored the BBC TV series, The Story of English, for which he was awarded an Emmy in 1986, followed by a Peabody Prize in 1987.

In July 1995, McCrum suffered a serious stroke, a personal crisis he described in My Year Off, a book now regarded as an essential study in the understanding of the condition.

He was literary editor of the Observer from 1996 to 2010, and published his award-winning biography P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in 2004. Globish (2010) was an international bestseller. My Year Off (1998), is now in its third edition as a Picador Classic.

McCrum was appointed Associate Editor of the Observer in 2008. He left the Guardian Media Group in January 2018 to pursue his own literary interests. His forthcoming book Shakespearean will be published next year by Picador.