Henry Hitchings is an author, reviewer and critic, specializing in narrative non-fiction, with a particular emphasis on language and cultural history. His second book, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English, won the 2008 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. He is the president of the Johnson Society of Lichfield. As of 2018, he is chair of the drama section of the UK’s Critics’ Circle.

He was a King’s Scholar at Eton College before going to Christ Church, Oxford, and then to University College London to research his PhD on Samuel Johnson.

In 2016 Hitchings edited a collection of original essays about bookshops, entitled Browse: The World in Bookshops. Its contributors included Alaa Al Aswany, Stefano Benni, Michael Dirda, Daniel Kehlmann, Andrey Kurkov, Yiyun Li, Pankaj Mishra, Dorthe Nors, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Ian Sansom, Elif Shafak, Iain Sinclair, Ali Smith, Sasa Stanisic and Juan Gabriel Vasquez.

We met in London to talk about Browse, and our experiences in bookstores around the world.