Joad Raymond Wren

Joad Raymond Wren is a Welsh writer and scholar, now based near Folkestone. He taught at the Universities of Oxford, Aberdeen, East Anglia, Queen Mary, University of London, and the Sorbonne, before leaving academia to write full time in 2022.

He has written about early modern Europe: about cheap print and news, angels, poetry, and the role of the imagination in political thought. He is the author and editor of at least a dozen books, some of which won prizes. His final academic book was an edition of Milton's Latin Prose for Oxford’s Complete Works of John Milton, which appeared in July 2025.

His novel, All the Colours You Cannot Name was published by Seren Books in 2024.

The Great Exchange: Making the News in Early Modern Europe was published by Penguin books in July 2025.

The Uses of Utopia: Travels to the Limits of Thought, will be published by Penguin books in July 2026.

He intermittently contributes to TV and radio documentaries, talking about the history of printing, seventeenth-century print culture, seventeenth-century women, news and pamphlets. He has written for the Guardian, the TLS, the LRB, the TES, History Today, BBC History and other journals.

He also writes and performs avant-folk music with a collaborative group under the name ‘The Unattached’.

He is currently writing a history of Britain through folk song.