Jonathan Meades is a writer, journalist, essayist and film-maker. His books include three works of fiction – Filthy English, Pompey and The Fowler Family Business – and several collections including Museum Without Walls, which received thirteen nominations as a book of the year in 2012. An Encyclopaedia of Myself was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize and longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2014. His first and only cookbook, The Plagiarist in the Kitchen, was published in 2017. Pedro and Ricky Come Again (2021) was the sequel to Peter Knows What Dick Likes (1988).

Meades has written and performed in more than sixty highly acclaimed television films on predominantly topographical subjects such as shacks, garden cities, megastructures, buildings associated with vertigo, beer, pigs, and the architecture of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Franco. He also creates artknacks and treyfs. Treyf means impure, not kosher: it sums up his approach to all writing, film and art.