Biography
John Sutherland is currently Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London. After graduating from the University of Leicester in 1964, he began his academic career as an assistant lecturer in Edinburgh. He specialises in Victorian fiction, 20th century literature, and the history of publishing. One of his most serious works of scholarship is the 1989 Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (in the US as Stanford Companion), a comprehensive encyclopedia 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.
Apart from writing regularly in The Guardian newspaper, Sutherland has published eighteen books and is editing the forthcoming Oxford Companion to Popular Fiction. The series of books which starts with Is Heathcliff a murderer? has brought him a wide readership. The books in the series are collections of essays about classic fiction from the Victorian period. Carefully going over every word of the text, Sutherland highlights apparent inconsistencies, anachronisms and oversights, and explains references which the modern reader is likely to overlook. In some cases he demonstrates the likelihood that the author simply forgot a minor detail. In others, apparent slips on the part of the author are presented as evidence that something is going on beyond the surface of the book which is not explicitly described (such as his explanation for why Sherlock Holmes should mis-address Miss Stoner as Miss Roylott in "The Adventure of the Speckled Band").
In 2001, he published Last Drink to LA, a chronicle of his alcoholism 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. 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.
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