John Ryle (writer)


John Rowland Ryle is a British writer, anthropologist and specialist in Eastern Africa. He is co-founder of the Rift Valley Institute, and of Anthropology at Bard College, NY.

Background

His father, , a doctor and alpinist, was a general practitioner in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, where Ryle was born. His mother, Melody Ryle, née Jackson, was a stalwart of the local Family Planning Association and a noted amateur botanist and gardener. Ryle is a grandson of the pioneer of social medicine John Alfred Ryle, a nephew of the astronomer Sir Martin Ryle, a great-nephew of the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, and a great-great grandson of John Charles Ryle, evangelical Bishop of Liverpool in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Life and work

Ryle was educated at Shrewsbury School and Oxford University, where he graduated in English Language and Literature. He pursued postgraduate studies in social anthropology, conducting fieldwork among the Agar Dinka communities in today's South Sudan. In 1975 he became an assistant editor at the . During the printers' strike at Times Newspapers, he founded, with Richard Boston, the acclaimed but short-lived periodical Quarto. From 1982 to 1986 he worked for the Sunday Times in London as Deputy Literary Editor and, subsequently, as a feature writer. He has written for the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the and various scholarly periodicals, and is a contributing editor of .
Ryle also worked as a doorman at the in Bond Street, London, as a roustabout for the Royal American Shows and the Canadian Pacific Railway, as ghost-writer of Mick Jagger's unpublished autobiography, and as a travel writer.
In the late 1980s, Ryle was a project officer at the Ford Foundation in Brazil and lived in an Afro-Brazllian community in Salvador da Bahia. In the 1990s, he worked as a consultant to relief and development organisations in Sudan and the Horn of Africa, including Save the Children Fund. His weekly newspaper column, , appeared in The Guardian from 1995 to 1999. From 1996 to 1997, he was a research fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. In the 1990s he became an activist in the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
From 2001 to 2017, Ryle was successively chair and executive director of the Rift Valley Institute, a research and public information organisation operating in Eastern Africa that he founded with and . He was a member of the , reporting on slavery and abduction in Sudan. Since 2007, he has been of Anthropology at Bard College, a liberal arts college in New York state. He is a board member of the and has also served on the boards of the and the scholarly journal .

Books