Damian Barr

Damian Leighton Barr (born 20 July 1976) is a Scottish writer and broadcaster.

Barr was born in 1976 in Bellshill, Scotland.

He graduated from Lancaster University in Sociology and English Literature in 1998, having spent a year studying at the University of Texas at Austin 1996–1997.

In 2000 he won an ESRC Scholarship and completed an MA in Contemporary Sociology.

It was inspired by a column Barr wrote for The Times in 2001–03 about graduate work and life.[ 3]

Barr's second book is Maggie & Me, a memoir of growing up in small-town Scotland during the Thatcher years.

Barr's first book was published in 2006 by Hodder & Stoughton.

Get It Together: How To Survive Your Quarterlife Crisis was the first book concerned with the quarter-life crisis to be published in the UK.

He is the creator and host of the Literary Salon, which started at Shoreditch House in 2008, and he hosts live literary events worldwide.

From 2008 -2018 he was Literary Editor of Soho House.

He is a frequent guest on BBC Radio 4 and has hosted Front Row – Dolly Parton, Javier Marías and Brad Pitt were among his interviewees.

Launching at Shoreditch House in 2008, Damian Barr's Literary Salon aimed to revitalise live literary events.

Readers and writers meet through special live events and online content including interviews, podcasts and brand-new stories.

The Salon has held residencies at the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, the Mondrian and the Savoy, and travelled to venues all around the world including Moscow, New York, Sydney, Auckland, Toronto and San Francisco.

The Savoy appointed Barr as the hotel's first ever Literary Ambassador, running their writers-in-residence scheme.

Salon guests have included Tracey Thorn, Rose McGowan, Maggie O’Farrell, Yaa Gyasi, Dustin Lance Black, Caitlin Moran, Philippa Perry, and Armistead Maupin.

Bloomsbury acquired the book at auction in July 2010 and it was published in the UK in April 2013 winning him Stonewall Writer of the Year, Sunday Times Memoir of the Year and the Paddy Power Political Satire Award.

It was a Radio 4 Book of the Week.

It has been optioned by STV and is being adapted for television by Andrea Gibb – Barr will also be a writer on the series.

He is the author of the 2013 memoir Maggie & Me, about his 1980s childhood in the west of Scotland, and the 2019 novel You Will Be Safe Here, set in South Africa in 1901 and now.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA).

In 2014 and 2015, he presented several editions of the BBC Radio 4 cultural programme Front Row.

He has hosted several television series including Shelf Isolation and most recently The Big Scottish Book Club for BBC Scotland.

From 2014 to 2017 he wrote BarrFly, the Sunday Times magazine's drink column.

In 2016 Bloomsbury pre-empted Barr's debut novel You Will Be Safe Here.

In 2016 he was Highly Commended by BSME as Columnist of the Year.

In 2016 he hosted his first half-hour documentary on BBC One revealing The Writers of Rye produced by Factory Films.

In 2017 Barr received an award from the Arts Council England to complete research on his novel in South Africa.

In 2018 Barr received a University of Otago Scottish Writers Fellowship, which saw him based at the Pah Homestead in Auckland, New Zealand where he edited the novel.

You Will be Safe Here was published internationally on 4 April 2019 and was shortlisted for several major awards (see below).

It featured as a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime, and confirmed Barr's reputation as one of the leading LGBTQI+ writers in the world today.

Barr has been a columnist for The Times, Sunday Times and The Big Issue, and wrote the travel column Novel Destinations for High Life Magazine.

In October 2019 Barr was on Sky Arts co-hosting the first ever live coverage of the Cheltenham Literature Festival along with Andi Oliver, Miquita Oliver and Simon Savidge.

As well as co-hosting with Andi in the studio he presented the Book Banquet, in which prominent writers recommended a range of books, and he diagnosed the reading habits of a variety of festival guests as the Book Doctor.

Damian brought books back to television in 2019 with The Big Scottish Book Club (produced by IWC for BBC Scotland).

In 2020 Barr completed his PhD in Creative Writing at Lancaster University.

Barr is the author of three award-winning books and several radio plays, and has contributed to several well-known collections (see below for full bibliography).

During the first lockdown in 2020 Damian devised and hosted Shelf Isolation, produced by IWC for BBC Scotland and BBC iPlayer.

The series returned in 2020 for a longer run, which was broadcast at the end of 2020.

The show featured Janice Galloway, Marian Keyes, Graham Norton, David Nicholls, Jojo Moyes, Neil Gaiman and Sathnam Sanghera, among many others.