Professor Patrick Wright joined King’s in September 2011, having previously been Professor of Modern Cultural Studies at Nottingham Trent University and, from 2004, a fellow of the London Consortium. Before 2000, Professor Wright lived for many years as a self-employed writer. While researching and writing books, he also worked as a journalist (including a five-year spell as a feature writer with the Guardian), and as a broadcaster, writing and presenting radio and television documentaries for the BBC and Channel Four. These included a four-part television history of the Thames (“The River”, BBC2, 1999). Patrick also presented BBC Radio Three’s Arts programme “Night Waves” over a period of approximately five years.

Patrick has written about the changing concept of heritage, the idea of China as it has featured in the British imagination, the literary origins and symbolic powers of the tank, and the development of the “Iron Curtain” as a divisive political metaphor that actually started out in the theatre. His latest book, The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness (December 2020) was researched during his six years at King’s and written in the wake of the Brexit referendum of 2016.

Selected publications

The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness Wright P. 2020, London: Repeater Books, 733 p.