Mark Damazer spent the bulk of his career at the BBC, where he held several senior editorial positions, including editor of television news, head of current affairs, head of political programs, and, finally, controller of Radio 4 (2004–2010). He was responsible for the network’s overall strategy and budget, digital content, commissions, and quality control across a range of genres, including arts, religion, science, documentaries, history, current affairs, comedy, and drama. Radio 4 was named U.K. station of the year in 2008.
Damazer created the partnership with the British Museum for Neil MacGregor’s award-winning series A History of the World in 100 Objects. An honorary fellow of the U.K.’s Radio Academy, he returned to the BBC as a member of its board (the BBC Trust) from 2015 to 2017, where he served on its editorial standards committee, focusing on the fairness, accuracy, and impartiality of all BBC programs.
Damazer was vice chair of the International Press Institute, a Vienna-based organization of editors, media executives, and leading journalists from 120 countries whose purpose is to defend media freedom and encourage independent journalism.
From 2010 to 2019 Damazer was master of St. Peter’s College at the University of Oxford, where he had overall responsibility for the budget, student and staff welfare, academic matters, development, and fundraising. Chairing the governing body of 35 fellows and most of its committees, he introduced a variety of measures focusing on diversity and inclusion and established the first body that brought together different Oxford colleges to discover and encourage best practices. During Damazer’s tenure at St. Peter’s, the college’s buildings and grounds were extensively renovated and new accommodations were provided for students.
For two years Damazer chaired Oxford’s undergraduate admissions committee, altering its focus to concentrate on measures encouraging growth in the number of students admitted to the university from disadvantaged backgrounds. He was also a member of Oxford’s development committee.
Damazer was on the board of the Victoria and Albert Museum from 2012 to 2019, becoming its senior nonexecutive director. As chair of the V&A’s digital strategy committee and then the visitor experience committee, he commissioned an overhaul of the museum’s digital estate and supervised the project whose mission was to make sense of the way visitors find their way around the labyrinthine building in South Kensington.
Since 2020 Damazer has been chair of the Booker Prize Foundation, which annually awards two of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes: the Booker Prize for the best sustained work of fiction written in English — by an author of any nationality — and published in the U.K. or Ireland; and the International Booker Prize for the finest single work of fiction from around the world which has been translated into English and published in the U.K. or Ireland. The Booker also does work in prisons and for the visually impaired. In recent years, the Booker has created a great deal of content celebrating quality fiction on the Internet and on its own social media sites.
Damazer chairs the exam board for Trinity College London, which specialises in music, drama, and English-language testing. He has written for a number of newspapers and periodicals, including the New Statesman, Prospect, Il Foglio, the Financial Times, the Times (London), and the British Journalism Review. He broadcasts from time to time on the BBC, focusing on the use of political language.
He studied at the University of Cambridge, was a Harkness Fellow at Harvard University, and served as a congressional fellow on Capitol Hill in Washington, working for Senator Paul Tsongas.
Awarded the CBE for services to broadcasting in 2011, Damazer lives in London.
