Mr John Hooper

John Hooper is an author and foreign correspondent who has devoted most of his working life to reporting from the countries of the Mediterranean. 

He is currently the Italy and Vatican Correspondent of The Economist and a former lecturer at the Florence campus of Stanford University. 

Hooper was previously Southern Europe editor of the Guardian and Observer and, before that, Central Europe correspondent of the same two newspapers. Over the course of his long career, he has worked for, among others, the BBC, Reuters and NBC and contributed to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and many other publications. Hooper has covered several conflicts including in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, Algeria, Kosovo and Afghanistan. 

He made his debut as an author with The Spaniards which won the following year’s Allen Lane Award for non-fiction. In revised form, as The New Spaniards, it has remained in print for more than 40 years. Hooper’s The Italians was a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic. He and Anna Kraczyna collaborated on the Penguin Classics annotated translation of Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio, published in 2025. 

Hooper, who divides his time between a home in Florence and an office in Rome, was the script consultant for Trudie Styler’s film An Ode to Naples, released in 2023. 

He graduated from St Catharine’s with an honours degree in History.

Carlo Collodi. The Adventures of Pinocchio (trans. with Anna Kraczyna). Penguin Classics. 2021

The Italians. Penguin (UK) and Viking (US). 2015

Reporting at the Southern Borders: Journalism and Public Debates on Immigration in the US and the EU. (Contrib.). Routledge. 2013.

Alien Landing: Beppe Grillo and the Advent of Dotcom Politics. Kindle Single. 2013

Fatal Voyage: The Sinking of the Costa Concordia. Kindle Single. 2012.

The New Spaniards. Penguin, 2^nd edition. 2006

The Spaniards. Penguin. 1986.