Shahidha Bari is an award winning critic, broadcaster and academic, who teaches at the University of the Arts London and presents a range of arts programmes for the BBC

In the course of this work – as well as hosting live events at the Southbank, Hay Festival and the Royal Society of Literature – she has interviewed a number of Booker Prize winners, including Anne Enright, Howard Jacobson, Julian Barnes, Marlon James and Salman Rushdie. 

Shahidha started her career studying English at King’s College Cambridge where she completed a PhD on the poet, Keats. She taught literature for over 15 years and is now a Professor at the University of the Arts London, based at London College of Fashion. Her book Dressed: The Philosophy of Clothes was published by Jonathan Cape in 2019, and was followed by Look Again: Fashion (2022), a guide to the Tate Britain collection. 

A well-regarded critic, she was the winner of The Observer Anthony Burgess Arts Journalism Prize in 2016 and is a regular book reviewer for the Guardian, Financial Times and the TLS, among other publications. You may recognise her voice from her work as a presenter on BBC Radio 4, variously hosting programmes such as Free Thinking, Front Row, Open Book and Start the Week. 

She has been a trustee of the educational charity Arts Emergency and currently sits on the board of The Brontë Parsonage. She was Chair of the Judges for the Forward Prizes for Poetry in 2019, and has served on the judging panel for the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2020, as well as the Baillie Gifford “Winner of Winners” 25th Anniversary Prize in 2023. She was a Booker Prize Judge in 2022, for which she read nearly 180 books. 

She is a board member of the Booker Prize Foundation.