Ian Jack, the Guardian columnist and former editor of Granta and the Impartial on Sunday, has died on the age of 77 after a brief sickness.
Jack was a gifted author, a superb and imaginative editor, and a mentor to youthful journalists. His final piece for the Guardian, printed per week in the past, was marking the centenary of the BBC, “one of many world’s nice cultural tasks”. He wrote: “It seems unlikely that Britain will ever once more invent something so admired and influential; we’ve been fortunate to have it.”
Katharine Viner, the editor of the Guardian, stated: “Ian Jack was one of many most interesting journalists of his era. He was an unbelievable reporter, stuffed with curiosity and observational ability, and he was additionally an exquisite author. Our readers beloved him; there was nobody like him.”
Jack was taken ailing on the Isle of Bute, the place he spent a part of yearly, and died in Paisley on Friday morning.
He was born in Lancashire, however his Scottish dad and mom returned to North Queensferry when he was seven. He began work as a trainee journalist on the Glasgow Herald in 1965.
In 1970, he moved to London to affix the Sunday Instances, then in its heyday below the editorship of the legendary Harold Evans. He was a piece editor after which a overseas correspondent, specialising in India.
He later wrote for the Observer and Self-importance Honest earlier than becoming a member of the crew that created the Impartial on Sunday, which he edited from 1991 to 1995. From there he moved to the editor’s chair at Granta, the literary journal, the place he remained till 2007.
For the previous 15 years, Jack was a columnist for the Guardian.
Alan Rusbridger, the previous Guardian editor who stepped down in 2015, tweeted: “Ian Jack was top-of-the-line. A phenomenal prose stylist who beloved the craft of reporting. An outsider with incurable curiosity abt how locations, establishments & individuals labored. A pointy & impish mind. A nostalgist who lived within the current. A heat, beneficiant man.”
Andrew Marr, a former editor of the Impartial, stated Jack was “one of many nice, smart originals of British journalism, strongly rooted in working class Scotland – in contrast to many of the commerce today – and with a deep understanding and love of business working class tradition.”
Lynn Barber, the journalist and interviewer, stated Jack was a “fantastic editor”, including: “I owe him a lot.” Jack employed Barber from the Sunday Categorical to affix the brand new Impartial on Sunday at its launch in 1990 – one of many many rising abilities he noticed as an editor.
The music author Richard Williams tweeted: “Shocked and deeply saddened by the sudden loss of life of Ian Jack, among the many most admired journalists of my era. It was a privilege to work with and for him, and to have the ability to name myself his buddy.”
The Indian historian Ramachandra Guha stated Jack mixed skilled distinction with “a uncommon private decency – he was one of many nicest human beings I’ve recognized”.
In addition to his journalistic output, Jack wrote, commissioned and edited a lot of books. Within the foreword to a set of essays and beforehand unpublished writing, The Nation Previously Generally known as Nice Britain, printed in 2009, Jack wrote of “the reminiscence of a unique nation, the one which formed my identification as each British and Scottish, and likewise, ultimately, as a Londoner with a part-time life in Scotland”.
His final main piece of writing was a 17,000-word piece for the London Assessment of Books on the Scottish authorities’s mishandling of the vitally wanted refurbishment and resupply of ferries between the Scottish west coast and islands within the context of a historical past of shipbuilding on the Clyde.
Jack’s first marriage to Aparna Bagchi led to 1992. He later married Lindy Sharpe, a meals and waste campaigner, with whom he had two kids.
