His biography of Henry Green won the Dictionary of Literary Biography Award (2000) and V. S Pritchett: A Working Life was shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread Award for biography and for the Duff Cooper Prize. Franco's Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory since 1936 (2013), published in Spanish by Ariel in 2015, was described by Antonio Muñoz Molina as "A book that must be read, in Spain and abroad, by anyone who wants to understand the country" and by Stanley Payne in The Wall Street Journal as "the best, and most objective, brief introduction to Spain's memory wars to be found in any language." His most recent book is Mr Straight Arrow: the Career of John Hersey, author of 'Hiroshima' (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019). The American Scholar said of it, "This admirable book about an admirable man… belongs to that elegant, reticent, wholly non-sleazy, and sadly disappearing genre known as literary biography, and for anyone interested in how a writer’s life is really lived as opposed to its incidental moments of glamour, Jeremy Treglown’s account of Hersey’s career—its constraints and opportunities, the worries and satisfactions, and the nature of the actual work—is deeply satisfying."
Treglown also wrote the first full biography of Roald Dahl, and initiated and, with Deborah McVea, co-edited the online index of previously anonymous contributors to the TLS. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he has been a member of the Society's Council and has served as chair of the judges of the Booker Prize, the Whitbread Award and other book prizes. Among various research posts, he has been a Visiting Fellow of All Souls and Fellow of the New York Library's Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, and of the Rockefeller Center, Bellagio.
He is currently researching the history of the Arvon Foundation.
In 1970 he married Rona Bower[1] (they met in an OUDS production of Romeo and Juliet in which she was Juliet, he Mercutio). They were divorced in 1982. In 1984 he married Holly Eley (née Urquhart), an assistant editor at the TLS, who died in 2010.[2] In 2013 he married Maria Alvarez, a philosopher at King's College, London. He has a son, three daughters and eight grandchildren.
Works
Mr. Straight Arrow: The Career of John Hersey, Author of Hiroshima / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, ISBN9780374280260
Franco's Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936 / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013, ISBN9780374108427, Chatto and Windus, 2014, ISBN9780701180621.
Spanish translation La cripta de Franco: Viaje por la memoria y la cultura del franquismo, Ariel, 2014, ISBN9788434418622
V. S. Pritchett: A Working Life, Chatto & Windus / Random House USA, 2004, ISBN978-0-7126-9725-5
Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green, Faber and Faber / Random House USA, 2000, ISBN978-0-571-16898-9
Roald Dahl: A Biography, Faber and Faber / Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1994, ISBN978-0-571-16572-8