Tony Gould

Tony Gould is a non-fiction writer with a special interest in biography and history. His biography Inside Outsider: the life and times of Colin MacInnes (Chatto & Windus, 1983) won the Pen silver pen award in 1984. His account of the life of a friend from Cambridge days in the 1960s, the Chilean writer Cristián Huneeus, Death in Chile: a memoir and a journey (Picador, 1992), was partly autobiographical. Two other of his books have grown out of his own experience. Imperial Warriors: Britain and the Gurkhas (Granta, 1999) was a long-delayed by-product of his national service in the 1/7th Gurkha Rifles, mainly in Malaya (as was), in the late 1950s. A Summer Plague: polio and its survivors (Yale University Press, 1995) owes much to his life-changing experience of that disease, which he contracted in Hong Kong in 1959. His other major work of medical history, Don’t Fence Me In: leprosy in modern times (Bloomsbury, 2005), thankfully was not the fruit of personal experience.

Tony worked as a BBC Radio talks producer in the mid-1960s and again later as a part-time freelance producer. In 1975 he became books editor at New Society, where he remained for many years, becoming literary editor of the New Statesman when the two magazines amalgamated in the late 1980s. From 1994 to 1998 he was a member of the literature panel of the Arts Council of Great Britain. In addition to his books, he has written numerous articles and reviews for a wide range of publications.