Boyd Tonkin is the literary editor at the Independent, feature writer and features editor of the weekly magazine for social service professionals, Community Care. He is an award-winning journalist and freelance-writer who has worked with The Observer as well as the social policy editor of the New Statesman. In addition to working as organizer and judge on the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize since 2000, he has judged the Booker Prize, the Whitbread biography award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and (in 2007) the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in literature. He has broadcast extensively for BBC arts and current-affairs programs. Mr. Tonkin studied English and French literature at Cambridge University.