For much of my working life I have edited non-fiction books on music, art, photography, sport or heritage subjects, and I work part-time as editorial director at Scala. Alongside this enjoyable career in publishing, I have had a longstanding interest in Indian music, which has included learning Indian vocal music at the Bhavan. I first met Ravi Shankar in 1994, and was his editor first, on his autobiography (Raga Mala, 1997). He was generous, engaged in life, full of energy and playful spirit, and I felt my world open up. He encouraged me to write his full life story after his death, and my biography Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar was published in 2020 by Faber & Faber (Hachette Books in the USA). Subsequently I have been speaking regularly on the subject in the media, at festivals or in bookshops.

At Scala, I have published art and heritage books for dozens of wonderful museums and other visitor sites, ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Science Museum and Pergamon Museum to Marylebone Cricket Club and Canterbury Cathedral. Highlights included a monograph on Herman Leonard, the exhibition catalogue Cosmonauts, James Stourton’s Great Collectors of Our Time, Adam Chadwick’s A Portrait of Lord’s and the official guide to Buckingham Palace. Earlier, as an editor at Genesis Publications, my authors included David Bowie (Moonage Daydream was listed among Rolling Stone’s greatest rock memoirs) and George Martin, as well as Ravi Shankar. I was also one of the team of four editors who put together The Beatles Anthology by The Beatles (2000), the #1 bestseller and British Book Awards Illustrated Book of Year. More recently I was project editor on The Beatles: Get Back (2021), which accompanies the Peter Jackson documentary.

Before Indian Sun I wrote one previous book, Rock Faces (Rotovision), a survey of leading music photographers. Books I have edited as a freelance include Olivia Harrison’s George Harrison: Living in the Material World (Abrams), John Robb’s Punk Rock: An Oral History (Ebury), and Andrew Robinson’s Einstein: A Hundred Years of Relativity, a project I conceived together with the Albert Einstein Archives, Palazzo Editions and the author, and which was published in ten territories; The Times acclaimed its ‘formidable array of contributors’ and its ‘exceptional collection of photographs and manuscripts’. I have also curated a Ravi Shankar exhibition at the Southbank Centre, London (5 March – 15 July 2022).

I live in London. I am available for writing, editing, consulting, curating or other commissions and for public events. Subjects I’m interested in range across biography, music, art, literature and photography. I’m particularly intrigued by the way that artists are formed by, and shape, the times and places they live in – that strange, complex dance between art and history. As an author I am represented by David Godwin Associates.