A.A. Gill

"My editor asked me what I wanted from journalism and I said the first thing that came into my head--I'd like to interview places. To treat a place as if it were a person, to go and listen to it, ask it questions, observe it the way you would interview a politician or a pop star," 
​- A.A. Gill
PHOTO CREDIT: HKTDC [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

ABOUT A.A. GILL

Adrian Anthony Gill (1954-2016), otherwise known as A.A. Gill, was a very witty and insightful British writer and critic, with a very British sense of humor.  His main areas of expertise included food, wine, travel, and television.   His resume of writing is long, with a long stint as the restaurant reviewer for The Sunday Times, frequent contributions to publications like Vanity Fair, GQ, Tatler, and Esquire, several novels, a couple books on individual restaurants and their gastronomy, a non-fiction book called The Angry Island (2005) examining the English and a similar non-fiction book on the United States called The Golden Door (2012), and finally, several wonderful collections of travel writing.  Gill’s writing was always acerbic but sometimes controversially so; he racked up numerous complaints to the Press Complaints Division.  Gill was a recovering alcoholic who recovered with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, which apparently prompted him to start using the name A.A. Gill for his writing, according to his obituary in the Guardian.  He died of cancer in 2016.  Gill is not well known in the United States, but we highly recommend his highly entertaining travel writing, starting with AA Gill is away (2002).

A5 RECOMMENDED TRAVEL BOOKS - A.A. GILL

GREAT QUOTES:

​“Pasta is eaten by happy smiley people having fun with people they love or fancy and are about to shag. Noodles are eaten by people who have no friends.”
- AA Gill

“You either get the point of Africa or you don't. What draws me back year after year is that it's like seeing the world with the lid off.” 
​- AA Gill

"I’ve got an embarrassment of cancer, the full English. There is barely a morsel of offal that is not included. I have a trucker’s gut-buster, gimpy, malevolent, meaty malignancy.”
- AA Gill, in the announcement that he had cancer in his Sunday New York Times column

INTERESTING LINKS:

  • ​A.A. Gill died in late 2016, weeks after revealing in his weekly column for The Sunday Times that he had cancer. In his last column, published the day after he died, he shared that he was refused treatment through the National Healthcare System that could have helped him live longer.  Read the column here.
  • Or, lean more about this superb writer in this obituary from the New York Times.

FIVE MINUTES WITH A.A. GILL - BBC