About me
I'm a reporter, critic and editor based in London. You can see me right here, looking at a tortoise.
I work as a contributing writer for 1843, and freelance probably slightly too much for a range of publications, mostly writing about arts and culture.
I'm also the former deputy editor and fiction editor of The Fence. I write a (very) intermittent Substack about fine art called ‘Paintings!’, which you can subscribe to here.
My reporting has been nominated for major awards on both sides of the Atlantic, and won a prize from the British Society of Magazine editors in 2021. That same year, I was nominated for New Journalist of the Year at the British Journalism Awards. In 2023 my long read about the channel crossings crisis was nominated for the Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils.
My writing appears semi-regularly in lots of publications. Here are some of them: GQ, The Economist, The TLS, The Telegraph, The Financial Times, Tatler, The Sunday Times, The Times, The Irish Times, The Spectator, Literary Review and Soft Punk.
Features I Wrote
Between Brexit and the deep blue sea: a lifeboat crew tackles the migrant crisis
1843 Magazine
“People would say, ‘Why don’t you kick them in the water?’” said Anthony Hills, a fisherman who volunteers at Dungeness. “I’d say, ‘How about you go out and look at them and kick them in the water? Have you seen someone drown? I have. You go look them in the eye and do that.’”
Features I Wrote
Quentin Tarantino: ‘There’s a lot of feet in a lot of good directors’ movies’
GQ Magazine
“When Paul Newman played a bastard, like in Hud,” writes Tarantino, channelling Booth’s POV, “he was still an enjoyable bastard. But the guy in Breathless wasn’t just a sexy stud prick. He was a little creep, petty thief, piece of shit.”
Contact
johnsamuelphipps // gmail
