“Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Harold Bloom and James Wood. And now you?”
“Oh, I mean, that’s pretty crazy to hear, but I don’t know.”
Dr Johnson never filmed a “spicy books with cartoon covers” vlog. But Jack Edwards cannot quite deny being the most important literary critic in the world. In commercial terms, he certainly is. A nod from him fills bathtubs, train carriages and public parks with copies of a book he likes. Booksellers buy and arrange their stock to his taste. And he is not confined to new releases. When he dug up an obscure Dostoevsky (White Nights), his positive review moved it from cellars to shop windows instantaneously. I first met him for this interview around the time of the 2024 International Booker Prize. He had been asked to host the ceremony – and to livestream it. I watched him cruise up the red carpet, encircled by cameras and attendants.
Edwards is a literary tastemaker, but not in the familiar mode. You will not find any submissions of his languishing in the LRB slush pile. Instead he posts on BookTok and BookTube, the social media planes concerned with reading, where millions of viewers watch videos about books. At first, BookTok was confined to the lonely bedrooms of coronavirus lockdowns. Now it has stalls at the Hay Festival and the National Literacy Trust. Waterstones has “BookTok made me buy it” tables.
Edwards is the foremost star of these platforms. Per his bio, he is the “internet’s resident librarian”. He is 27 years old and, on YouTube, has 1.5 million subscribers and 158 million views – which is roughly 16 and 1,755 Wembley Stadiums respectively. He is conventionally handsome, and excitable and sensitive in manner. He started YouTube while at secondary school in Brighton. His first videos were “day in the life” vlogs, study tips and A-level results reactions.
The boom came when he progressed to Durham University to study literature. His atmospheric recordings of undergraduate life proved so popular that the dean of his college now calls its oversubscription “the Jack Edwards effect”.
His next major growth spurt came when his university career ended. When Oxford University rejected his master’s application in 2020, Edwards posted a video of himself crying, entitled “oxford university rejected my masters application… (sorry this video is sad)”. Social media rewards confession. Authenticity, sincerity and vulnerability were important – more important than orthodox intellectual baubles. He described social media to me as “democratic… When you log on, you don’t need a qualification, you don’t need to be an established journalist.”
Graduating into the pandemic was “confusing and strange”, he says. Edwards did not feel he could be a “StudyTuber” if he was no longer a student. He spent a month alone. During it, he read 30 books and decided he wanted a career in them. But he could not secure a job in a hotel, let alone one in publishing.
Unlike other hopefuls, however, Edwards had a platform. He could not get jobs with publishers, but HarperCollins was willing to publish his guide to university life, The Uni-Verse. Having tried the conventional routes into employment, Edwards launched himself as a full-time book influencer. He posted reading-related videos from London, Paris, New York, Korea and elsewhere. The period was “really special” to Edwards. He read favourite authors in their native locations. He started Mieko Kawakami’s All the Lovers in the Night on the bullet train to Tokyo and finished the last page as the train arrived. “From the first page I was just absolutely entranced… I felt this real sense of catharsis, that I’d been through this entire journey, physically throughout Japan, but also with that author.” Occasionally, in a bodega, a coffee shop, a bookstore or a library, people would “tap me on the shoulder and say that they read their favourite book because they found it from my channel. And there’s no better feeling in the world than that – nothing.”
Like many graduates his age, Edwards settled down in London. He posts reviews, commentary and hauls. His style as a literary creator has become defined, and honours the lessons of his social media success. Books get positive reviews if they stir his emotions – especially if they make him weep. With social media, he told me, “we can visually see people reacting to a book and having a kind of subjective emotional response that feels even more personal than maybe a book critic or journalist can. [In traditional reviews] we don’t get to see them crying in response to a book that broke their heart. I think that’s part of the magic of BookTok.”
Edwards champions BookTok and also defends it. Critics argue that the platform is more about being seen reading than actually reading, and that it promotes low-quality fiction. Edwards rejects that characterisation energetically: “The only feature common to all ‘BookTok books’ – which can mean both enemies-to-lovers roommate novels and Greek mythological retellings – is popularity with a young audience.” He reminds me of “White Nights”, the Dostoevsky story that his review placed “alongside Colleen Hoover and Sarah J Maas on a ‘BookTok made me buy it’ shelf… I’ll recommend contemporary novels alongside classics because I think often we’re looking for those moments that resonate with us and that feel perennial, that feel evergreen.”
His favourite classics are by Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. They are “people who I think really understood the human condition, what it was to feel, to love, and to interact with the people around us.” More recently, “I’m a big Sally Rooney fan. She talks about when you’re on your deathbed you’ll think about the people that you loved and that you interacted with… it’s not frivolous to make art about the people that you loved and that you interacted with.”
He keeps his core content mostly apolitical. There is a progressive, inclusionary tone to his videos – “a book from every country in Asia” or “banned books and rainbow capitalism” – but he is seldom explicitly partisan online. He is more outspoken, however, on his X account, where he reposts Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana and makes no secret of his dislike for Keir Starmer’s Labour government.
Mostly, his commitment is to books. He told me: “I think one of the truest things for the world right now is that the worst of times can facilitate really incredible art, and we need that sort of self-expression.” Where we have come from, where we are going, and so on are crucial considerations when giving praise: “They always do represent where we’re at as a society and a culture.” Edwards quoted Bertolt Brecht, asking if there will also be singing in the dark times – and answering yes: there will be singing about the dark times.
When we first spoke I was struck by how open and positive Edwards was. It may come easily to the enormously successful, but Edwards maintained a generous, pleasant perspective the whole time we spoke. Abusive comments: “Sometimes people’s responses can be quite personal. I suppose that’s probably the drawback. But the pros outweigh the cons by a long way!” A spanner about the Booker’s politics: “You’re making me work for it, I’m on my toes!” Suffering a fanbase pile-on, as he did after criticising the author of The Kissing Booth: “Yeah! People feel very strongly about books. That’s part of the fun!” On the relevance of establishment awards: “For me they’re a good guiding light to discover new things.” On pressure: “I obviously feel pressure being online… to always keep it kind.”
It seems he has always been that way. A student at university contemporaneously with Edwards told me how sardonic whispers would circulate whenever it became known that “the YouTuber” was in a bar. People would ask for selfies, not without a trace of nastiness. At that time, Edwards was far from successful enough to overwhelm such sneers. But he was always a good sport. I was shown a picture in which he had been willing to hold up a baby doll that he had been handed without explanation.
But soon after our first interview, Edwards’s output waned. His videos became sparser and more subdued, and they stayed that way for the rest of 2024. Then, at the start of 2025, Edwards posted a confessional video titled “every book I want to read in 2025 (and why i stopped posting book reviews)”. He described last year as “something to survive” and admitted that it had “got to the point where I had to really seriously consider whether I wanted to continue doing this.”
Edwards is subject to copious online abuse. On camera, he mentioned withholding his opinions on pop culture because people called them cringe. But the harassment is much harsher than that, and touches on topics Edwards does not mention. The top posts on his own Reddit page accuse him – without citing evidence – of not reading the books he talks about, plagiarising reviews and “scamming” his followers with unsubstantial paid-content tiers. The thread about him on the gossip forum Tattle Life has been remade after reaching the site’s comment limit four times. The comments often speculate, cruelly, about his sexuality.
On top of calculated abuse, Edwards also suffered from the ambient pressures of fame. For instance, the book review site Goodreads labels Edwards’s account “#1 most read”: if he leaves a review on a book, it will be the first one users see, meaning a negative review can severely affect a book’s chances of success.
All this got to Edwards. Friends asked if he realised he was apologising and issuing disclaimers before speaking when he socialised with them. He lived with his “guard up all the time, flinching constantly, feeling just genuinely afraid to share anything”. He stopped posting opinions and even changed his accent because of criticism. In the video in which he discussed his withdrawal, he acknowledged commenters who said they missed “the old Jack”. He said, “I miss him too, I really do.”
Becoming an influencer is now by many accounts the most popular career ambition for the young. But many who succeed take long breaks for their mental health, or withdraw entirely. Edwards reckons that online fame is “not something the human brain is wired for”. He described it as “traumatic” to see “so many people discussing something about you.” It feels “so invasive and intimate”.
Edwards was born in Brighton in 1998 with terrible eyesight. A prescription of 8.75 keeps you off the football pitch. “You don’t really see the ball until it’s, like, inches from your face, and by that point it’s too late to pick which part of the head it’s gonna hit,” Edwards told me when we spoke again in August last year. His bookishness proceeded from his near blindness; his parents taught him the letters very young so they could get him a proper eye test. He started a blog to review the new Hunger Games film when he was 14.
If reading was a solitary pastime for Edwards the child, it is a solitary job for Edwards the man. He lives in a flat in Soho – not a cheap part of London – with another content creator for a flatmate. He never joined anything like a graduate scheme with colleagues his age. He rents a co-working space because, he says, “I like to feel like there is life going on around me.” He sometimes wishes someone would give him feedback on his work before he publishes it, because when the first judges are the commenters, “at that point there’s no room to manoeuvre… you kind of get tested in the public court before you, you know?”
Edwards’s Zoom background featured the same bookshelves visible in his dejected January 2025 video. But he seemed to have developed a new toughness since then. He looked older, with a more muscular neck and longer, slightly receding hair, and he seemed almost bloody-minded about pushing on. In his own words, “Maybe my prefrontal cortex just developed, but I no longer care to have to argue my point or prove my moral worth every time I don’t enjoy something.” He dismissed unfair criticism flatly, calling it “nitpicking culture” and “moral panic” that is “not how the world works”. Where his old videos overshared in “toxic honesty”, he now has definite lines about not discussing his friends or relationships. That “really cutting remarks” are the comments that “stay with you”, he acknowledged as an unfortunate but permanent fact. He had a detached view of social media. As well as disdaining the angsts it causes, he distrusts the comforts it offers. “You have this illusion of community,” it was surprising to hear him say, “when we’re really very alone.”
His latest project is an attempt to forge real community, though it is still essentially a social media product. He wants his new book club, Inklings, to be “this book club community where I can have something that’s a bit more solid, tangible”. When I asked about his hopes for the next five years, he said he was focusing on the work. At that time, Inklings had no episodes but was already the fastest-growing club in the platform Fable’s history. Since then, its episodes have featured Oisín McKenna (Evenings and Weekends), David Nicholls (One Day), Coco Mellors (Cleopatra and Frankenstein), Luke Thompson (Bridgerton) and the actor Cillian Murphy.
In September, he recorded an episode with Palestine-born novelist Yasmin Zaher at the Saatchi Gallery. A large, orderly crowd filled pews in a white gallery lit by pink accent lights. I had been the only man of the first 20 people to queue. It was possible to track the location of a daddy long legs that was floating through the room by the screaming and lurching it provoked. Edwards came down the aisle in a t-shirt and corduroy trousers, laughing nervously and smiling at his fans, who cheered. On stage, he said it was “so special for me to get to be here with you all… to take this thing we do in isolation… moments we spend in our own heads… and turn it into community”.
Edwards said he escaped feeling overexposed by “finding something – for me, it’s been books and reading – to refract everything through”. He asked whether Zaher’s characters obsessed over “being clean, perhaps because there’s little else they can control”, and whether, in the case of another, the “dirty parts of her she couldn’t clean then became a target”. He said we knew “almost too much” about the protagonist when we heard her “sexual perversions and hot takes”, and mentioned another who “withholds, and she keeps for herself almost as a way of maintaining ownership of, and having control of, her identity, and saying, actually, I can’t be defined by external sources; I define myself”.
Zaher’s novel, The Coin, was her debut. Edwards asked if being unknown allowed her a “lack of inhibitions”. She agreed that you are freer when “you don’t know who your audience may be”. Edwards knows who his audience is, and they know him. He told me of fans commenting on his interviews that they could answer every question for him.
But if the relationship is not free; it is tender. Rose, 25, unemployed after failing to find a job in publishing, had been watching him “constantly for five years”. She said, “I literally rediscovered the love of literature through him – so big, big fan.” Allesia, 21, unemployed after recently graduating, had gotten into Edwards after immigrating from Ukraine six years ago, at which point she could not read in English. “I like how accessible he is to people who don’t read or have just started reading.” Ryan, 28, had watched Edwards for a decade. He now directs AI engineering at a tech company but had previously worked for influencers in LA. He had seen that “it’s all consuming when your entire life is to be someone; that can be brutal”.
Almost everyone was there by themselves. Some came with a parent or a friend, but I didn’t see a crowd of three. Rose said Edwards’s content was “the kind you stumble onto when you’re, like, in your room alone”. Ryan said that in his decade of viewing he had come to “enjoy my self more”. Almost immediately after taking the microphone, Edwards had said, “Bear with me while I try not to cry.” It was easy to imagine his audience feeling he had done the same for them. Edwards helped people, Rose reckoned: “He brings a lot of, like, humanity and empathy… I think the world would be a better place if everyone read fiction. It’s literally learning how to put yourself in other people’s shoes.”
Edwards is working on his first novel. He would only tell me that it is historical and set in the UK. He will certainly find a publisher. He claims his whole life has been “that pursuit of letters on a page”. Whether that pursuit will lead to literary greatness of course remains to be seen. He may not become Dr Johnson – but Jack Edwards seems, at last, to be becoming himself.
[Further reading: Cats are better than dogs – and much better than David Baddiel]
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This article appears in the 21 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Europe is back
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