Bill Buford

The Essentials At The New Yorker in New York City, Bill Buford has worked inside one of the magazine’s most exacting editorial systems since 1995. Across criticism, fiction, and food writing, the constant is not genre but attention — to structure, to voice, and to the ways appetite enters the page as subject, evidence, and method. At Granta and later at The New Yorker, Buford moved between editing and writing, including service as fiction editor and then as a writer and editor. Those roles place him close to the machinery of the magazine page, where language is shaped line by line and the distance between private interest and public form is narrow. His own line, "I've always been interested in food.", reads less like a detour than a practical statement of subject: food is one of the places where character, ritual, and hunger show their workings plainly. The range of his work also follows from the kind of curiosity that can hold apparently separate worlds in the same frame. Buford’s own reflection — "I wonder how I went from football hooligan to food." — names that shift without smoothing it over. One term carries noise, force, and disorder; the other carries craft, memory, and attention. Put together, they mark a writer interested in appetite in all its forms, whether it shows up in a crowd, on the page, or at the table. What gives the career its shape is continuity beneath the change in subject. At Granta and The New Yorker, Buford’s editorial discipline and writing practice remained in close conversation, with fiction editing and long-form writing both demanding precision and range. His statement, "I've always been interested in food.", clarifies the thread: the work stays attentive to how people behave under pressure, how language reveals appetite, and how a subject becomes legible when handled with enough care.

In Their Words “I wonder how I went from football hooligan to food.” “I've always been interested in food.”