Susannah Clapp
- Prizes judged
Susannah Clapp was a founding editor, with Karl Miller, of the London Review of Books and, since 1997, has been the theatre critic of the Observer, a job in which she thought she’d last ‘a year’.
Clapp came to theatre criticism after spells at the publisher Jonathan Cape - where she edited Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia - and the London Review of Books. She recalls being asked at her Observer interview if she ever cried at plays: ‘I am more likely to be prompted to tears by Anne of Green Gables than King Lear’. Her emphasis as a critic ‘is as much on evocation as evaluation’. Clapp has also written biographical studies on both Chatwin and her friend Angela Carter - herself a Booker Prize judge in 1983 - and is literary executor of their estates.