Bio - TC Masters Judge Jay Rayner

Jay Rayner is a British journalist, writer and broadcaster who has written for a wide range of British newspapers and magazines such as GQ, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, The New Statesman and Granta. After graduating from Leeds University in 1988, he joined The Observer newspaper for whom he now reviews restaurants. In 2006 he was named Critic Of The Year in the British Press Awards.

His first novel, The Marble Kiss, was shortlisted for the Author's Club of Great Britain First Novel Award and his second, Day of Atonement published in 1998, for the Jewish Quarterly Prize for Fiction. He is also the author of the novels The Apologist, (known in the US as Eating Crow) and The Oyster House Siege, as well as the non-fiction work Stardust Falling. He won a Sony Radio Award in 1997 for "Papertalk," BBC Radio Five Live's magazine program about the newspaper business.

He regularly appears as one of the food critics on Masterchef, and was on the panel of critics who made up the "enemy" on the daytime cooking show Eating with the Enemy. Most recently, Rayner came out with The Man Who Ate the World, a tour of the world's greatest restaurant cities and his search for the perfect meal. The paperback edition will be published this summer.