Joad Raymond Wren is a Welsh writer, now based in Folkestone. He grew up poor in Cardiff, was educated at the University of East Anglia and Oxford University, and taught at the Universities of Oxford, Aberdeen, East Anglia, Queen Mary, University of London and as a visitor at the University of Granada. His last teaching was as a visiting professor at Sorbonne Université, Paris. He departed academic life in 2022 in order to write full time.
In that past life he wrote about early modern Europe: about cheap print and news, angels, politics and poetry, and the role of the imagination in political thought. Among the dozen scholarly books of which he is the author and editor, under the name Joad Raymond, are: News Networks in Early-Modern Europe (Brill, 2016), The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641-1649 (Oxford, 1996; 2005), Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003); Milton’s Angels: the Early-Modern Imagination (Oxford, 2010); and (ed.) The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, vol. 1: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 (Oxford, 2011).
His first novel, entitled All the Colours You Cannot Name was published by Seren Books in 2024. Not many people have read it.
In July 2025 he published two books. His last academic book, which is an edition of Milton’s Latin Defences, for Oxford’s The Complete Works of John Milton, gen. eds. Thomas N. Corns and Gordon Campbell, for which he hopes to be rewarded in Heaven. And The Great Exchange: Making the News in Early-Modern Europe, published by Penguin books … read on in the blog.
He intermittently contributes to TV and radio documentaries and podcasts, 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 has recently completed a study of utopias throughout history and literature, entitled The Uses of Utopia: Travels to the Limits of Thought, to be published by Pelican books in 2026. He is currently writing a history of Britain explored through folk songs, with the working title For the Sake of the Song.
His other interests are mainly parenting, running, making and looking at art, making and listening to music, and staring at the sea. Under the name The Unattached – a collaborative project with more accomplished musicians – he writes and performs avant-folk music.
Joad R Wren 