Born in London, UK, where her parents settled in 1960 after migrating from
India, Maya Jaggi was educated at
Oxford University and the
London School of Economics. Her first job, in the 1980s, was as Literary Editor of the journal
Third World Quarterly, where she "created a literature section that embraced Latin America as part of the global South", commissioning and publishing work by and about major writers. In the late 1990s, she joined the staff of
The Guardian, working on the foreign news desk while also writing for the paper's cultural pages. In addition, she has contributed articles and reviews to a wide range of publications, among them
The Financial Times,
The Independent,
The Economist,
The Times Literary Supplement,
The Observer,
The Sunday Times, the
Daily Telegraph,
Index on Censorship, the
Literary Review, the
Evening Standard,
Newsweek, the
Wall Street Journal,
New York Review of Books,
New Statesman,
Bookforum,
Wasafiri magazine and
Words Without Borders. In September 2004, she was one of 50 Black and Asian writers celebrated for their contribution to the canon of contemporary British literature in a photograph at the
British Library entitled "A Great Day". She has received various awards over the years and in 2012 her work was recognised with an honorary doctorate from the Open University, the citation noting that Jaggi "occupies a unique place in British journalism, and has had a transformative influence in the last 25 years in extending the map of international writing today." She has also been an EU Senior Expert in Cultural Journalism in post-Soviet Europe. In 2022, Jaggi was Writer in Residence at the
Writer's House of Georgia in
Tbilisi, and in 2023 she was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Literary profiles She has interviewed a dozen Nobel Prize-winners for literature, including
Gunter Grass,
Mario Vargas Llosa,
Jose Saramago,
Toni Morrison,
Derek Walcott,
V. S. Naipaul,
Kenzaburō Ōe, and
Orhan Pamuk (before he won the prize), and practitioners of diverse art forms, such as filmmaker
Costa Gavras, musician
Abdullah Ibrahim, painter
Frank Bowling, dancer
Carlos Acosta, and
Oprah Winfrey. Several of Jaggi's literary profiles have appeared in such collections as
Lives and Works (2002),
Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk (ed.
Susheila Nasta, 2004) and
Women of the Revolution: Forty Years of Feminism (ed.
Kira Cochrane, 2010). The 2001
Penguin Modern Classics edition of Chinua Achebe's
Anthills of the Savannah has an introduction by Jaggi.
Broadcasting Her work as a broadcaster encompasses contributions to such BBC radio programmes as
The Strand,
Front Row,
Night Waves,
Off the Page,
Any Questions? and
The World Tonight, In 2009, Jaggi's interview with cultural theorist
Stuart Hall was the subject of a 258-minute film by
Mike Dibb entitled
Personally Speaking: A Long Conversation with Stuart Hall.
Other cultural activity Jaggi has served as an adviser to the
London Arts Board and the
British Council, an executive member of
English PEN and as a judge for numerous literary awards: the
Orange Prize, the
David Cohen Prize, the
Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the
Guardian Fiction Prize, the
Saif Ghobash–Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, the
Amnesty International UK Media Awards, the
Harvill Secker Young Translators' Prize, the
Warwick Prize for Writing, the
Wasafiri New Writing Prize, the
Man Asian Literary Prize, the
Caine Prize for African Writing, the
International Dublin Literary Award, the
OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and others. She participates regularly in literary festivals, presents seminars and live events, and is a board member of
Wasafiri magazine and a patron of the
SI Leeds Literary Prize. She is also a member of the
Folio Prize Academy. In April 2016, she was Artistic Director of the project "Where Europe Meets Asia: Georgia 25", a cultural week marking the 25 years since
Georgia gained independence from the
Soviet Union. Talks, films and other events took place in London at Asia House and elsewhere, with participants including
Boris Akunin,
Boyd Tonkin,
Donald Rayfield,
Aka Morchiladze,
Dato Turashvili,
Zurab Karumidze,
Claire Armitstead,
Maureen Freely, and others. Jaggi has chaired the judging panel of the
EBRD Literature Prize (2024 and 2025), and she serves as critic-at-large for
Words Without Borders. ==Awards and recognition==