Maya Jaggi, WWB Critic at Large, is an award-winning critic, cultural journalist, and artistic director whose writing on global literature and art appears in the Financial Times, New York Review of Books, and Guardian Review, among other publications, and who contributes to the BBC.
A former staff journalist for the Guardian in London, she was a leading long-form profile writer and fiction critic for its cultural review from 1999–2015, winning four national press awards and being named a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Journalism. Known especially for pioneering cultural writing on the global South, she has reported from five continents, and was one of the first British journalists to interview writers such as Orhan Pamuk, Arundhati Roy, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Mia Couto, and W. G. Sebald. She studied at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Open University (the UK’s largest higher education institution) for her “transformative influence in extending the map of international writing.” Her work as an artistic director includes Where Europe Meets Asia: Georgia25, the UK’s first festival of contemporary Georgian writers and film (London, 2016), and Sea of Stories on the Gulf of Poets, a bilingual conversation series at Italy’s Suoni dal Golfo classical music summer festival (Liguria, 2019). She has trained cultural journalists in post-Soviet Europe as an EU Senior Expert, and been a DAAD Arts and Media fellow in Berlin, an Associate Fellow of Warwick University, and a judge of international literary awards including the Man Asian prize in Hong Kong (as chair), and the €100,000 Dublin IMPAC. Follow her on Twitter: @MayaJaggi. She can also be reached at mljaggi@aol.com.
