Tobias Jones (writer)

Tobias Jones is a British author and journalist. He was educated at Jesus College, Oxford, and then worked at the London Review of Books and the Independent on Sunday. He moved to Parma in Italy in 1999, returning to the UK in 2004. Jones and his wife now manage a ten acre woodland shelter near Shepton Mallet, Somerset called Windsor Hill Wood. The sanctuary is the subject of his 7th book, A Place of Refuge.

His first book, The Dark Heart of Italy was a bestseller in Britain, Italy and the United States. Following its publication, he was short-listed for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award.

In January 2007 he published his second book Utopian Dreams(Faber & Faber) after a year spent travelling with his wife Francesca and first daughter Benedetta across five communities in Britain and Italy. The book was featured on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week as well as being Book of the Week on that network.

Jones' third non-fiction book, Blood on the Altar, is a real-life mystery about the disappearance of a teenager in a church in Potenza in 1993. The case took nearly 20 years to be solved, in which time her family came up against a corrupt church, organised crime and the chronic indifference of the authorities. It was only when a housewife over a thousand miles away in Bournemouth, England, was brutally murdered that the net finally closed in on a hair fetishist from Potenza. Blood on the Altar was long-listed for the Gordon Burn prize.

The Salati Case was the first in a series of crime novels featuring Castagnetti, a bee-keeping private detective in northern Italy. The second Castagnetti crime novel, White Death, was published in 2011. The Third Castagnetti novel, Death of a Showgirl, came out in 2013.

Jones has written and presented two TV series for Rai 3: Ricchi d’Italia and Cervelli d’Italia. He has also written various documentaries for BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4. Blood on the Altar and A Place of Refuge have both been optioned by film companies, as has Jones’s Guardian Long Read about the disappearance of Yara Gambirasio.

Jones is a regular contributor to the British and Italian press. A selection of his investigative and opinion pieces can be found below:

• The murder of Yara Gambirasio
• Addiction and Recovery
• The Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi
• Danilo Restivo’s Murder Conviction
• A Brief Appreciation of Ross MacDonald
• The Life and Death of Justin Fashanu