Jonathan Bate is a well-known biographer, critic, broadcaster and scholar, and he is Provost of Worcester College and Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company, broadcasts regularly for the BBC, and has held visiting posts at Yale and UCLA. In the Queen's 80th Birthday Honours, he was awarded a CBE for his services to Higher Education, and in 2015 he became the youngest person to have been Knighted for services to literary scholarship.

His many publications include The Genius of Shakespeare, described by Sir Peter Hall as 'the best modern book on Shakespeare'; a biography of the poet John Clare that won the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Prize; and, most recently, a biography of Ted Hughes that was runner-up for the Samuel Johnson Prize and, in the USA, winner of the Biographers International Organization award for the best Arts and Literature biography of 2015.

He is married to the writer Paula Byrne, and they have three children.