Gaby Wood HonFRSL is the Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation. Prior to her appointment at the Booker, Wood was Head of Books at the Telegraph, and for the previous 15 years she was an editor and staff feature writer at the Observer, reporting for the last seven of those years from New York. From 2007-2008 she was a Fellow of the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library.
She is the author of The Smallest of All Persons Mentioned in the Records of Littleness, and of Edison’s Eve, a history of automata, which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle award for non-fiction.
She has written, and occasionally illustrated, for a number of publications including the London Review of Books, US Vogue, the New York Review of Books, Granta and the New York Times, to which she has also contributed photographs. She won the Royal Photographic Society Gold Medal in 2012, and exhibited her prints at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2021.
She has sat on judging panels for the Booker Prize, Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and Granta’s Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists, among others. She grew up bilingually in English and Spanish and holds a first-class degree in French.
She was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2021.