Bee Wilson


Beatrice Dorothy "Bee" Wilson is a British food writer, journalist and historian and the author of five books on food-related subjects.

Biography

Wilson is the daughter of the writer A.N. Wilson and the academic Katherine Duncan-Jones. Her sister is the classicist Emily Wilson. She attended Trinity College, Cambridge, and it was from Cambridge University that she received her doctorate for a dissertation on early French utopian socialism.
For five years from 1998, Wilson was the food critic of the New Statesman magazine, where she wrote about subjects such as school meals.
After that, Wilson wrote the "Kitchen Thinker" column in The Sunday Telegraphs "Stella" magazine for twelve years. For the column, she was named the Guild of Food Writers food journalist of the year in 2004, 2008 and 2009.
Wilson has written book reviews and other articles for The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Times Literary Supplement. She has written "Page Turner" blogs for The New Yorker on ideas about the recipe. She has contributed articles to the London Review of Books, on subjects such as film, biography, history and music.
In 2016, her book First Bite: How We Learn to Eat won the Special Commendation Award at the Andre Simon Food and Drink Awards and Food Book of the Year at the Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards. That book was described in the Financial Times as being "about the pleasure of eating and how we can reconnect with this".
Wilson is chair of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.

Reception

According to The New Yorker writer Jane Kramer, "Bee Wilson describes herself as a food writer. That's half the story". In Kramer's opinion, Wilson writes on food as it relates to history, ideas and human life. In The New York Times, Dawn Drzal described Wilson as "a congenial kitchen oracle".

Works