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Patrick Wright is an English writer with an interest in the cultural and political dimensions of modern life. He is the author of On Living in an Old Country (1985), A Journey Through Ruins (1991), The Village that Died for England (1995), Tank: the Progress of a Monstrous War Machine (2000), and Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War (October 2007). He studied English and American Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury from 1970-3, and also at Simon Fraser University near Vancouver, where he lived for five years before returning to Britain in 1979. He worked for the National Council of Voluntary Organisations from 1982-7, and then spent fifteen years as a self employed writer and broadcaster.
He has written for many magazines and newspapers, including the London Review of Books, the Guardian (where he was a contracted feature writer in the early 1990s), the Washington Post, the Independent and the Observer. He has been a presenter of BBC Radio 3’s Night Waves and his television work includes The River, a four part BBC2 series on the Thames (1999), A Day to Remember, a documentary history of Remembrance Day, broadcast by Channel 4 in 1999, and a number of more recent programmes on BBC4.
He was co-curator of Tate Britain’s exhibition of Stanley Spencer’s work in 2001, and is now a part-time Professor at the Institute for Cultural Analysis at Nottingham Trent University. He is presently collaborating with the film-maker Patrick Keiller on a research project entitled ‘The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image’ and writing a book about the British discovery of ‘New China’ in 1954. He also teaches with the London Consortium.