Boyd Tonkin is the Literary Editor of The Independent. Before joining the newspaper in 1996 he wrote for The Observer, was Literary Editor of the New Statesman, Features Editor of Community Care Magazine, and has also taught literature in higher education. He has judged the Booker Prize, the David Cohen Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and re-founded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for literature in translation. Books to which he has contributed range from the Oxford Good Fiction Guide to Reading the Vampire Slayer. He has appeared on a wide variety of broadcast Arts programmes, and has reported on literary and cultural matters from countries including India, Brazil, Ukraine, Cuba, Finland and Greece.