Alan Taylor is the founding editor of the Scottish Review of Books, and the author of Appointment in Arezzo, a memoir on Muriel Spark. A former Booker Prize judge, he has written for the TLS, The New Yorker and The Melbourne Age, and edited four anthologies as well as Glasgow: The Autobiography. Taylor will be speaking on the art of the critic and Muriel Spark at the Auckland Writers Festival in May and is the the international judge assisting the panel selecting the winner of the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize in this year's Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.