Katharine Viner

Raised in Yorkshire,[2] Viner is the daughter of teachers. Her grandfather, Vic Viner, was an able seaman involved in the Dunkirk evacuation.[7][8] Viner was educated at Ripon Grammar School,[9] where she was head girl.[10] As a teenager, she joined Youth CND and the Anti-Apartheid Movement, although the nearest groups were 25 miles away, and read Spare Rib.[2] Her first newspaper article, published in The Guardian in 1987 while she was still at school, was on the ending of the GCE O level examinations, which were being replaced in the UK by the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE).[11] "Cramming five years of knowledge into two and a half hours does not seem to be a fair system", she wrote.[10] Around 1988, Viner had a period of work experience at the Ripon Gazette, her local newspaper.[12][13]

After A levels Viner read English at Pembroke College, Oxford.[10] Just before her finals, Viner won a competition organised by The Guardian's women's page and was advised by Louise Chunn, then Guardian women's editor, to pursue a career in journalism. "I honestly thought journalism wasn't for me, I thought it was for men in suits in London", she remembered in 2005.[14] During her 20s, Viner spent most of her holidays in the Middle East, a region in which she has a particular interest, spending time in Lebanon, Syria, Israel, West Bank and other locations.[14]

For work experience, Viner joined Cosmopolitan, a women's monthly magazine. The magazine retained her afterwards and she became features assistant, then news and careers editor;[14] earlier, she had won another student competition involving a submission to the magazine.[15] After three years at The Sunday Times, working as a commissioning editor and writer for its magazine.[14] Viner joined The Guardian in 1997. Following a period on the staff of the women's page, she became editor of the Saturday Weekend supplement in 1998. She became features editor in 2006[16] and deputy editor in 2008 at the same time as Ian Katz.[17] Viner edited the Saturday edition of The Guardian from 2008 to 2012.[11]

Laura Slattery in The Irish Times, reviewing Viner's career up to March 2015, noted that she "has almost always been the person who does the commissioning, [rather than] provided the byline".[18] Several Guardian pieces by Viner published during this period are reprinted in an anthology drawn from the Guardian archive entitled Women of the Revolution: Forty Years of Feminism (2010), edited by Kira Cochrane.[19]

In January 2013, Viner's relocation to Sydney to supervise a new Guardian digital edition in Australia was announced;[20] this venture was launched in May 2013.[21]

Viner delivered the AN Smith Lecture in Journalism at the University of Melbourne in October 2013.[22][23] D. D. Guttenplan, London correspondent of the American Nation magazine, wrote in March 2015 that "there is no one on either side of the [Atlantic] ocean who has thought as deeply as Viner about the relationship between readers, technology and the future of journalism."[24] Guttenplan is not totally convinced by Viner's "eagerness to transcend print" in the move to digital media, but commenting about her 2013 speech in Australia, he writes that "her arguments for the importance of reader engagement, and for sustained, original reporting of information that someone, somewhere, wants to keep secret are compelling and convincing."[24]

In the summer of 2014, Viner moved to New York City and became the new head of The Guardian's American website in succession to Janine Gibson while remaining deputy editor of Guardian News & Media.[21][25] While based in New York, Viner expanded GuardianUS's coverage from a limited range of subjects, into areas like the arts and sport and increased staffing.[26]

Outside journalism Viner is known for My Name Is Rachel Corrie, a play she co-edited with actor Alan Rickman from the writings and emails of Rachel Corrie, an American activist who was killed by a bulldozer operated by the Israeli Army in Rafah, Gaza in 2003.[41][42] The play was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in 2005.[41] After Rickman died of cancer in January 2016, Viner wrote that their collaboration had been initially difficult, but "on the opening night we each admitted that we couldn’t have done justice to Rachel’s words without the other".[43]

Viner was a judge in the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2004[44] and was on the board of the Royal Court Theatre for 13 years.[45]

In 2002, Viner criticised the planned invasion of Iraq and wrote that George W. Bush "bombed Afghanistan to liberate the women from their burkas (or, as he would have it, to free the "women of cover"), and sent out his wife Laura to tell how Afghans are tortured for wearing nail varnish".[46]

Viner is an opponent of Brexit. She wrote: "At the end of a campaign that dominated the news for months, it was suddenly obvious that the winning side had no plan for how or when the UK would leave the EU – while the deceptive claims that carried the leave campaign to victory suddenly crumbled."[47]

• Contributor page, The Guardian website
• My Name is Rachel Corrie and the New York Theatre Workshop postponement, Interview with Lynn Moffat, Jim Nicola and Katharine Viner on Democracy Now, 22 March 2006
• "Candidate's Statement: Katharine Viner", Statement in the internal ballot of Guardian journalists, National Union of Journalists website, c. February 2015