Robin Blake

After reading English at Cambridge, and a few years in teaching, Robin worked for Capital Radio’s features unit as a broadcaster and producer. He has also taught a course in radio production at Goldsmiths College, London. He became a full time writer in 1986.

Robin has written books, journalism, scripts and essays on many subjects. His early books include Mind Over Medicine (1986) and Compulsion (1987), and the novels Fat Man’s Shadow (1988) and The Gwailo (1990). In the 1990s Robin wrote principally on art history, with biographies of Anthony Van Dyck (1999) and George Stubbs (2005), while Essential Modern Art came out in 2000. Reverting in 2011 to fiction, he published A Dark Anatomy, his first ‘ante-procedural’ 18th-century crime story about Titus Cragg, coroner of Preston. The series now stretches to eight titles with a ninth coming in 2024.

He has also been a ghost-writer and adapter of film and television scripts and was for a number of years a weekly columnist at The Independent on Sunday. Subsequently he regularly reviewed art exhibitions for the Financial Times.

Robin has contributed essays to the quarterly Slightly Foxed and elsewhere, including the RLF’s online column Collected. Robin’s blog is accessible through his website.