Ian Thomson was born in London in 1961. His parents moved to New York that same year, where his father worked for a Wall Street bank. (His mother, a Baltic émigrée, came to England in 1947 at the age of seventeen) Thomson was educated at Dulwich College, then at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he read English.
Dulwich College.
Subsequently he taught English literature and English as a foreign language in Rome, then became a translator, journalist and writer, contributing to the Sunday Times Magazine, The Independent, The Guardian, The Observer, The Spectator and Times Literary Supplement. He was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University College London. Currently he is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Non-Fiction at the University of East Anglia.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
His first important book, Bonjour Blanc: A Journey Through Haiti (1992), an amalgam of history and adventure, was recommended by J. G. Ballard as “hair-raising but hugely entertaining”, and by the film director Jonathan Demme as “a great and abiding classic”. His book, Primo Levi (2002), a biography, took ten years to write and is seen today as the definitive life of the Italian writer and concentration camp survivor.
In 2005 Ian Thomson went back to the West Indies to write the The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica (2009), seen now as one of the most controversial books written on Jamaica. Zadie Smith spoke in Harper’s Magazine of an "excellent book".
Ian Thomson edited Articles of Faith: The Collected Tablet Journalism of Graham Greene (2006), and contributed a short story to Kingston Noir (2012), a collection of fiction set in the Jamaican capital by various contemporary writers.
In 2011, he donated the memoir, Fall and Rise of a Rome Patient, to Oxfam’s ‘OxTravel’ project, a collection of United Kingdom articles by 36 travel writers. Ian Thomson has translated the Sicilian crime writer Leonardo Sciascia into English, and has lectured at Columbia University, Princeton University and the Royal Society, London. 2002 Primo Levi: A 1998 Society of Authors Foundation Grant Primo Levi: A.
1998 Society of Authors Foundation Grant Primo Levi: A Life 2002 Royal Society of Literature W.H.Heinemann Prize Primo Levi: A Life 2009 Society of Authors Foundation Grant The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica 2010 Royal Society of Ondaatje Prize The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica 2010 Dolman Travel Book Award The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica.
