Draft:Joad Raymond Wren

Joad Raymond Wren (born Cardiff 1967) is a Welsh writer, based in London and Folkestone.

Until 2021 he was a professor of renaissance literature, and taught at the Universities of Oxford, Aberdeen, East Anglia, and Queen Mary University of London, and held various visiting posts overseas, the last at Sorbonne Université, Paris, in 2021. He is the author and editor of thirteen academic books about early-modern literature and history, Milton and angels, and especially the history of newspapers in Britain and Europe. His work is associated with transforming the history of news and newspapers, initially in anglophone scholarship, and subsequently in international perspectives on news communication. In 1999 Michael Mendle wrote “Joad Raymond's work has quickly become the gold standard for studies of seventeenth-century English journalism.” While according to Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille, his work on early-modern pamphlets “reveals the author's astounding knowledge of the field”, another his "seemingly tireless research". His books have been awarded prizes by the Sixteenth Century Society and the Milton Society of America. The most recent is the multi-authored Communicating the News in Early Modern Europe, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. His edition of Milton’s Latin prose is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

He has appeared in TV and radio documentaries, talking about the history of printing, seventeenth-century print culture, seventeenth-century women, news and pamphlets.

In 2021, suffering from Long Covid, he retired from academic life in order to write popular history and fiction. His first novel, All the Colours you Cannot Name, will be published by Seren Books in March 2023.

As ‘The Unattached’, a collaborative project, he writes and records music. Associated musicians include his sister Gwenifer Raymond, Darren Hayman, Ian Button,  Robert Rotifer, John McGrath, and Holly Rogers. Their first album Songs for the Prophets, ‘future folk’ music exploring the relationship between music and history, was by WIAIWYA in 2019. The second Unattached album, Requiem for Dead Dogs, was released by Gare du Nord Records in 2023.