Name Kate Muir | Role Novelist | |
Books Suffragette City, Left Bank, West Coast, The Insider's Guide to, Arms and the Woman | ||
Kate Muir is a Scottish novelist, screenwriter and critic. She was chief film critic of The Times for seven years, and is the author of three novels.
Contents
Early life
Muir grew up in Dalmuir, West Dunbartonshire, and attended Westbourne School in Glasgow. At the University of Glasgow, she graduated with an LLB in Jurisprudence and Politics, and later completed a postgraduate journalism diploma at Cardiff University.
Career
Muir's first job was on the Ealing Guardian, and then she worked as a reporter for two start-up newspapers: News On Sunday in Manchester and The Sunday Correspondent in London, before arriving at The Times in 1990 as a weekly interviewer. She was posted to New York in 1992, then Paris in 1995, then Washington D.C. in 1999 as a foreign features writer for The Times. In Paris, she began a weekly personal column in The Times Magazine which continued for 11 years.
In 2010, Muir became the chief film critic of The Times, covering reviews and film festivals. At a Cannes press conference in 2011 her question regarding Nazi aesthetics resulted in a huge faux pas for Danish director Lars von Trier and his subsequent ban as "persona non grata" from the film festival. During her time as a critic, Muir also became a campaigner for Women and Hollywood, which advocates for equality and diversity in Hollywood and the wider movie industry, and is now on the advisory board of the charity. Muir left The Times in 2017 to work as a screenwriter and novelist.
Muir has written three novels: "West Coast", "Left Bank" and "Suffragette City", and two non-fiction books, "The Insider's Guide to Paris" and "Arms and the Woman", about the battle for female equality in the military.
Personal life
Muir has three children and lives in north London. She was previously married to fellow Times feature writer and associate editor, and author, Ben Macintyre.