Ted Hodgkinson is Head of Literature and Spoken Word at Southbank Centre, where he oversees the year-round literature programme, London Literature Festival, Poetry International and the National Poetry Library. Formerly online editor at Granta magazine, his essays, interviews and reviews have appeared across a range of publications and websites, including the Times Literary Supplement, the Literary Review, the New Statesman, the Spectator, the Literary Hub and the Independent.

He is a former British Council literature programmer for the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. He is a member of the selection panel for the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Fellowship, and a former judge for the EBRD Literature Prize 2019 for the best novel in translation, the 2019 Orwell Prize for political writing and has judged a number of other awards. He co-edited, with Icelandic author and poet Sjón, the first anthology of Nordic short stories in English, The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat and other stories from the North (Pushkin Press, 2017), to critical acclaim. In 2018, for a second consecutive year, he was named in The Bookseller’s list of the 100 most influential people in publishing. In 2020, he chaired the International Booker Prize and was made a Trustee of English PEN.