Alastair Sooke is an author and broadcaster, and chief art critic at The Telegraph
He has written and presented more than 60 hours of television and radio for the BBC, and produced three books about art published by Penguin; a new title, focusing on a single masterpiece by the 19th-century French artist Georges Seurat, will be published by London’s National Gallery in 2025. Recently, he filmed six new episodes of his television series China’s Greatest Treasures (following the success of the first series, a major production for BBC News, which attracted tens of millions of viewers internationally). The Way I See It, his 30-part BBC Radio 3 series about modern art, made in collaboration with New York’s Museum of Modern Art (and repeated on BBC Radio 4), is available on BBC Sounds. He is a trustee of The Ampersand Foundation and has judged the biennial Ampersand Foundation Award (worth £125,000), the 2024 Sky Arts Award for visual art, and the inaugural Hepworth Prize for Sculpture. He has served on the British Council’s Venice Biennale selection committee as well as advisory boards of both the Classical Art Research Centre at the University of Oxford and the Courtauld, and has moderated many events at festivals and museums. He has also presented award-winning short films for various galleries, charities, companies and brands (including Art Fund, Christie’s, Frieze x Frédéric Malle, the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and Tate), and has led tours of modern art on the French Riviera for Martin Randall Travel. Prior to his appointment, in 2019, as chief art critic at The Telegraph (for which he has worked continuously since 2003), he wrote a fortnightly column for the BBC Culture website; he has also written catalogue essays about artists including Phyllida Barlow and Ian Davenport, and contributes to The World of Interiors magazine, published by Condé Nast. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, and the Courtauld Institute of Art, and lives in London with his wife and three children.
