Mark Hudson is a British award-winning writer, journalist and art critic whose work ranges across visual art, music, travel, social history and cultural criticism. He is the art critic of The Independent and the London-based editor-at-large of the internationally respected arts and literary journal The Brooklyn Rail. He previously served for five years as chief art critic of The Daily Telegraph and has contributed to publications including The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Observer, Financial Times, Mail on Sunday, Gagosian Quarterly and Royal Academy Magazine.

His acclaimed first book, Our Grandmothers’ Drums, grew out of a year spent living in a village in The Gambia. Combining travel writing, social observation and personal experience, the book received both the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Somerset Maugham Award. His subsequent work, Coming Back Brockens, an account of life in a former mining community in County Durham, won the NCR Award for non-fiction.

Hudson is also the author of The Music in My Head, a novel engaging with the international world-music movement and its encounters with West Africa, and Titian: The Last Days, a highly personal study of the great Venetian painter’s late works. Across his books, he brings together history, travel, cultural criticism and direct participation, moving with unusual fluency between African cultural experience, British social history and the international visual arts.

As a critic, Hudson is known for independent judgement, intellectual candour and an ability to make complex works of art accessible to a wider public. His continuing reviews and essays examine both established masters and contemporary artists, while his interviews for The Brooklyn Rail contribute to an international conversation among artists, writers, critics and cultural institutions.