The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) is a fortnightly literary review published in London by News UK, a subsidiary of News Corp.
History The TLS first appeared in 1902 as a supplement to The Times but became a separate publication in 1914. Reviews were normally anonymous until 1974, when signed reviews were gradually introduced during the editorship of John Gross, who "personally felt that reviewers ought to take responsibility for their opinions."
Martin Amis was a member of the editorial staff early in his career.
Its editorial offices are based in The News Building, London. It is edited by Martin Ivens, who succeeded Stig Abell in June 2020. It was published weekly until August 2025, when it moved to a fortnightly schedule.
Many writers have described the publication as indispensable. Mario Vargas Llosa, novelist and the 2010 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, described the TLS as "the most serious, authoritative, witty, diverse and stimulating cultural publication in all the five languages I speak".
Notable contributors Many distinguished writers have contributed, including T. S. Eliot, Henry James and Virginia Woolf. Philip Larkin's poem "Aubade", his final poetic work, was first published in the Christmas-week issue of the TLS in 1977. While it has long been regarded as one of the world's pre-eminent critical publications, its history is not without gaffes: it missed James Joyce entirely, and commented only negatively on Lucian Freud from 1945 until 1978, when a portrait of his appeared on the cover."20.07.11 London W11", The Times Literary Supplement, 29 July 2011: 3.
The TLS has included essays, reviews and poems by D. M. Thomas, John Ashbery, Italo Calvino, Patricia Highsmith, Milan Kundera, Philip Larkin, Mario Vargas Llosa, Joseph Brodsky, Gore Vidal, Orhan Pamuk, Geoffrey Hill and Seamus Heaney, among others."TLS writers past and present", Times Online.
Editors 1902: James Thursfield 1902: Bruce Richmond 1938: D. L. Murray (David Leslie Murray) 1945: Stanley Morison 1948: Alan Payan Pryce-Jones 1959: Arthur Crook 1974: John Gross 1981: Jeremy Treglown 1991: Ferdinand Mount 2003: Peter Stothard 2016: Stig Abell 2020: Martin Ivens
See also The New York Review of Books London Review of Books List of literary magazines
References
Further reading May, Derwent (2001). Critical Times: The History of the Times Literary Supplement. HarperCollins. . Campbell, James (2023). NB by J.C.: A Walk through the Times Literary Supplement. Carcanet.
External links
The Times Literary Supplement at the Internet Archive Typescripts of poems submitted between 1962 and 1967 at the University of Leeds