Bio
Tina Brown graduated with an M.A. from Oxford at St Anne's College and is the author of two plays: "Under the Bamboo Tree," which was performed at the Edinburgh Festival, and "Happy Yellow," at the London fringe Bush Theater. It was also chosen among the annual presentations by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
She made a lifelong detour into journalism in 1973, writing for the London Sunday Times, the New Statesman and the Sunday Telegraph. That same year, she won the Catherine Pakenham Award for Most Promising Female Journalist of the Year, and her writing from this era was collected in two books, "Life as a Party" and "Loose Talk."
Tina Brown's editorial reputation for revitalizing publications began at the Tatler magazine, a nearly defunct 270-year-old "society" magazine in London, where she was named editor in chief in 1979, when she was 25 years old. During her tenure there from 1979 to 1983, the circulation rose 300 percent and the magazine was purchased by Condé Nast in 1982.
At the end of 1983, S.I. Newhouse, chairman of Condé Nast magazines, invited Brown to move to the United States to be editor in chief of the recently launched and seriously ailing Vanity Fair magazine. Under her direction, from 1984 to 1992, Vanity Fair rose from a circulation of 350,000 to 1.1 million and won four National Magazine Awards, including a 1989 award for general excellence. Brown herself was named Advertising Age's first magazine editor of the year.
In 1992 Mr. Newhouse invited Brown to take on another big publishing challenge -- the revitalization of the New Yorker magazine. She was the fourth editor in the magazine's 73-year history and was the magazine's first female editor. In her six-and-a-half-year tenure, she raised circulation by 145 percent on the newsstand and 28 percent overall, and the magazine was honored with four George Polk Awards, five Overseas Press Club Awards and 10 National Magazine Awards, including a 1995 award for general excellence, the first in the magazine's history. Brown was the first magazine editor to be honored with the National Press Foundation's Editor of the Year Award in 1992.
At the New Yorker, Brown hired 75 new writers and editors, including David Remnick, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Malcolm Gladwell, Simon Schama, Anthony Lane, Ken Auletta, Jeffrey Toobin, Jane Mayer and John Lahr. She started the publication of quarterly New Yorker special issues, including a much-publicized "Black in America" issue, which she edited in conjunction with Henry Louis Gates Jr. The New Yorker editorial staff were proud when the magazine proved to be one of the best-selling special issues in the last 10 years, and a seminar on race the magazine produced at Harvard University received a great deal of media attention.
In 1998, Brown left the New Yorker and founded Talk Media with partners Harvey and Bob Weinstein of Miramax Films, launching Talk magazine and the Talk Miramax Books company. Talk's publication was suspended in January 2002 in the wake of the advertising recession following 9/11. It had achieved a circulation of 650,000 and rising.
Talk Miramax Books flourished as a boutique publishing house until it was detached from Miramax in 2005 and made a part of Hyperion at Disney. Out of 42 books published under Brown's tenure, 11 have appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List, including "Icebound," "Stolen Lives," "Snow Garden," "A Density of Souls," "My Forbidden Face," "Artemis Fowl," "Surrendering to Marriage," "Summerland," "Leadership" by Rudolph Giuliani, "Leap of Faith" by Queen Noor and "Madam Secretary" by Madeleine Albright.
From April 2003 to May 2005 Brown was the host of CNBC's "Topic A With Tina Brown," a weekly series that featured opinionated guests discussing and debating provocative topics in the arenas of business, politics and culture. In June comes her first long-form nonfiction book, "The Diana Chronicles," published by Doubleday.
Tina Brown is married to Sir Harold Evans, former editor of the Sunday Times of London, president of Random House and author of the best-selling "The American Century" (Knopf) and "They Made America" (Little, Brown). In November 2000, Brown was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) by Queen Elizabeth, for her services to overseas journalism. The couple have two children, George and Isabel, and reside in New York.
