John Cornwell FRSL (born 21 May 1940) is a British journalist, author, and academic. Since 1990 he has directed the Science and Human Dimension Project at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he was also, until 2017, Founder and Director of the Rustat Conferences. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters (University of Leicester) in 2011. He was nominated for the PEN/Ackerley Prize for best UK memoir 2007 (Seminary Boy) and shortlisted Specialist Journalist of the Year (science, medicine in Sunday Times Magazine), British Press Awards 2006. He won the Scientific and Medical Network Book of the Year Award for Hitler's Scientists, 2005; and received the Independent Television Authority-Tablet Award for contributions to religious journalism (1994). In 1982 he won the Gold Dagger Award Non-Fiction (1982) for Earth to Earth. He is best known for his investigative journalism; memoir; and his work in public understanding of science. In addition to his books on the relationship between science, ethics and the humanities, he has written widely on the Catholic Church and the modern papacy, often with much controversy.
Early life
John Cornwell was born in East Ham, London, the son of Sidney Arthur Cornwell and Kathleen Egan Cornwell. Raised as a Roman Catholic, Cornwell entered the junior seminary, Cotton College, in 1953 intending to become a priest. He later wrote a memoir of his five years at Cotton. He continued to the senior seminary, Oscott College, Sutton Coldfield, in 1958.
Cornwell studied English Language and Literature at St Benet's Hall, Oxford and was tutored by Jonathan Wordsworth at Exeter College. He graduated in 1964, and went on to Christ's College, Cambridge as a graduate student.
After Cambridge, Cornwell taught in East London schools, before becoming a teaching fellow in English and philosophy at McMaster University, Ontario. From 1970 to 1976 he worked as a freelance journalist, mainly for The Guardian and The Observer Magazine, with periods in Italy and Latin America as a Foreign Correspondent. In 1973 he reported from Buenos Aires, and in 1975 from Santiago, Chile, and Buenos Aires. From 1976 to 1988 he was on the staff at The Observer, serving on the Foreign desk and later as Editor and Manager of The Observer Foreign News Service, which he took from hard copy to high speed wire delivery worldwide. In 1982 he was appointed New Media Publisher, responsible for developing seven parallel media businesses, including creation of UK's first interactive electronic newspaper with Prestel, joint venture book publishing, and educational resources. He was The Observer'''s delegate at the International Press Institute (1978–1988); investigator and rapporteur on the 20th Century Fund Task Force convened in New York and Oxford in 1978–79 on the tensions between Western free-enterprise media and government media organisations: findings and analysis published in his Free and Balanced Flow (1979).
His first two books were novels: The Spoiled Priest, and Seven Other Demons. Two decades later he published a third novel, Strange Gods. In 1973 he published a critical biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge, Poet and Revolutionary, 1772–1804.
In 1982 he published Earth to Earth, the story of a farming family tragedy at Winkleigh in Devon, for which he won the non-fiction Gold Dagger Award.
A Thief in the Night
His 1989 book A Thief in the Night investigated the 1978 death of Pope John Paul I, which is surrounded by conspiracy theories. Though Cornwell sharply criticised Vatican prelates, he concluded that the Pope was not murdered but died of a pulmonary embolism, possibly brought on by overwork and neglect.
Hitler's Pope
In 1999, Cornwell published Hitler's Pope, in which he accuses Pope Pius XII of assisting in the legitimisation of the Nazi regime in Germany through the pursuit of a Reichskonkordat in 1933 and of remaining silent, like the Allies, after information about The Holocaust was released to the public in late 1942 and early 1943. Owen Chadwick praised the book's scholarly approach and the abundance of new information Cornwell had managed to unearth.