Kevin Jackson Dies

The English writer, broadcaster, filmmaker and pataphysician, Kevin Jackson, born 3 January 1955, died last week on 10 May 2021. He was the author of Bite: Diary of a Vampire Housewife (2009), Bite: Pavane for a Vampire Queen (2011), and Bite: A Vampire Handbook (2010).

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 had been a freelance writer since the early 1990s and then became a regular contributor to BBC radio programmes, including the BBC Fourth Programme's Saturday Review.

Jackson often collaborated on projects in various media: with, among others, the film-maker 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, 2102); 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's Third Programme – eartoons). Jackson also conducted a long biographical interview with Blegvad, published by Atlas Press in September 2011 as The Bleaching Stream. Jackson appeared, 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 his book of interviews with Sinclair, The Verbals in 2002.

He was among the founder members of the London Institute of Pataphysics, and holds the Ordre de la Grande Gidouille from the College de Pataphysique in Paris. He is 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.