Kevin Jackson (writer)

Kevin Jackson (3 January 1955 – 10 May 2021) was an English writer, broadcaster, filmmaker and pataphysician.

He was educated at the Emanuel School, Battersea, and Pembroke College, Cambridge. After teaching in the English Department of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, he joined the BBC, first as a producer in radio and then as a director of short documentaries for television. In 1987, he was recruited to the Arts pages of The Independent. He was a freelance writer from the early 1990s and was a regular contributor to BBC radio programmes, including Radio 4's Saturday Review.

Jackson often collaborated on projects with, among others, the filmmaker Kevin Macdonald, with whom he co-produced a Channel 4 documentary on Humphrey Jennings, The Man Who Listened to Britain (2000); with the cartoonist Hunt Emerson, on comic strips about the history of Western occultism for Fortean Times, on two comics inspired by John Ruskin (published by the Ruskin Foundation) and on a book-length version of Dante's Inferno (Knockabout Books, 2012); with the musician and composer Colin Minchin (lyrics for various songs, and the rock opera Bite, first staged in West London, October 2011); and with the songwriter Peter Blegvad (short surreal plays for BBC Radio 3 – eartoons). Jackson also conducted a long biographical interview with Blegvad, published in September 2011 by Atlas Press as The Bleaching Stream. Jackson appears, under his own name, as a semi-fictional character in Iain Sinclair's account of a pedestrian journey around the M25, London Orbital. Worple Press published Jackson's book of interviews with Sinclair, The Verbals in 2002.

He was among the founder members of the London Institute of 'Pataphysics, and held the Ordre de la Grande Gidouille from the College de Pataphysique in Paris. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Companion of the Guild of St George. From 2009–2011 he was visiting professor in English at University College London.

Jackson died on 10 May 2021, at the age of 66.