Nicholas Coleridge

Coleridge was born in London, the son of David Coleridge, who was chairman of Lloyd's of London in the late 1980s and descended from a brother of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.[4] He is the eldest of three brothers, and educated at Ashdown House, Eton College[5] and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied theology and history of art.[6] As an Eton schoolboy, he won the Jeremy Thorpe Cup for debating with his school friend Craig Brown, though the trophy was later renamed when Thorpe's reputation fell under a shadow.

He has written fourteen books,[7] both fiction and non-fiction, based largely upon either his professional life (The Fashion Conspiracy, Paper Tigers, With Friends Like These) or episodic novels (A Much Married Man, Godchildren, Deadly Sins, The Adventuress). The Fashion Conspiracy was the Number One bestseller, hardback non-fiction (The Times, 4 March 1988). His autobiography, titled The Glossy Years : Magazines, Museums and Selective Memoirs published September 2019 by Penguin Fig Tree, was #No 1 in Art Books, #No 1 in Fashion Books, #No 1 in Showbiz Biography. It was described by The Sunday Times as "the most entertaining book of the year".

He has been chairman of the PPA – the Professional Publishers' Association – and two-term chairman of the British Fashion Council for four years, overseeing London Fashion Week for the Department of Trade and Industry.

He was founding chairman of Fashion Rocks, the fashion and rock music extravaganza showcasing the world's eighteen top fashion designers including Dior, Chanel, Prada and Ralph Lauren paired with eighteen top rock stars including Beyoncé, Robbie Williams, Bryan Ferry and David Bowie. It raised more than £3 million for the Prince's Trust charity. He was on the advisory board for the Concert for Diana, Wembley Stadium 2007.

He has been a member of the Council of the Royal College of Art, and a member of the trading board of the Prince's Trust. He was a director of PressBof,[8] the parent organisation of the Press Complaints Commission, 2007–2014. He is an Honorary Bencher of the Middle Temple since 2022.

While on assignment making a television documentary about Tamil terrorism in Sri Lanka in 1984, he was arrested and jailed for ten days in Welikada prison, Colombo, where he embarked upon writing a collection of short stories, 'How I Met My Wife'.

As a journalist, he has been an irregular contributor to The Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, The Spectator and the Financial Times. In 1976, between school and university, he was a cub reporter on the Falmouth Packet newspaper in Cornwall. From 1979 to 1982 he was associate editor of the Tatler, working for then editor Tina Brown; from 1982 to 1985 he was a columnist at the Evening Standard. In 1983 he appeared on an episode of the tv chat show Loose Talk, which can be viewed here.

From 1986–1989 he was editor-in-chief of Harpers & Queen magazine, a Hearst title, before joining Condé Nast.

In 2002, as chairman of the British Fashion Council, he suggested that the then Sunday Times fashion editor, Colin McDowell, was habitually too negative about British fashion designers.[9] This drew criticism from McDowell, who accused Coleridge of jingoism.[9]

He was described by Campaign magazine in 2012 as “magazines' most compelling advocate for almost two decades”.[10]

He is married to the healer and author Georgia Metcalfe and has four children, Alexander, Freddie, Sophie and Tommy. They live in Chelsea, London, and in Worcestershire. The December 2007 issue of Condé Nast's World of Interiors magazine contains a feature on his country house, the 1709 Wolverton Hall in Worcestershire. In 2019, he commissioned a garden folly, a 46-foot writing tower, in a Tudor-Georgian-Jacobean style, by the architect Quinlan Terry. The folly won a first prize at the 2021 Georgian Group Architectural Awards, and the Craftsmanship Prize at the 2021 British Brick Awards.

He has seven godchildren, and his novel Godchildren was dedicated to them. Two of the godchildren, Cara Delevingne and Edie Campbell, are now well-known British models.[11] Another of his godchildren, journalist Ned Donovan, married Princess Raiyah bint Al Hussein of Jordan.

He was the 1982 British Press Awards Young Journalist of the Year, as a columnist at the Evening Standard, and was given the Mark Boxer Lifetime Achievement Award for magazine journalism by the British Society of Magazine Editors in 2001. In 2013, he was awarded the Marcus Morris Lifetime Achievement Award for publishing by the Professional Publishers Association (PPA). In June 2017, he was inducted into the Professional Publishers Association's Hall of Fame by Lord Heseltine. In May 2018 he was awarded the lifetime "Outstanding Contribution to British Media" Prize at the British Media Awards.

He is the only person ever to be awarded all four of the Publishing industry’s Lifetime Achievement Awards.

Coleridge was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2009 Birthday Honours[12] and was knighted in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to museums, publishing and the creative industries.[13][14][15] He was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant for Worcestershire in 2022. In September 2023, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Literature and Honorary Fellowship by the University of Worcester, and an Honorary Doctorate of Arts by the University of Buckingham.

A portrait of Coleridge by photographer William Teakle is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.[16]