David Sutton

David Christopher Sutton (born 18 October 1950) is a British archival researcher, cataloguer, indexer, librarian, literary scholar, copyright researcher, food historian, fairtrade campaigner, bus company director, urban regeneration specialist and local politician. Career Trained as a librarian/archivist in Dublin and Sheffield, he has been a member of staff at the University of Reading Library since 1982. A party member in the Labour Party since the 1960s, he was leader of Reading Borough Council for 13 years, from May 1995 to May 2008. Then from 2010, he became chair of the board of Reading Buses, the local municipally-owned bus company, and also chair of the Reading Fairtrade Group. For his archival research and literary editorial work on the Location Register of English Literary Manuscripts and Letters he was nominated for the McColvin Medal in 1992 and highly commended for the Besterman Medal in 1998. He was awarded the Benson Medal in 2002 by the Royal Society of Literature for outstanding services to literature. He was named Archivist of the Year by the Scone Foundation of New York in 2006. He is currently Director of Research Projects, based in the University Library, at the University of Reading, and an associate member of the University's School of English and American Literature (SEAL). In respect of UK literary archives, he has been Chair (2010–17) of the Group for Literary Archives and Manuscripts (GLAM), and in respect of literary archives worldwide he has been Chair/Président (2010–21) of the Section for Archives of Literature and Art (SLA) of the International Council on Archives (ICA). Since 2012 he has been Principal Investigator for a project initially funded by the Leverhulme Trust and entitled the Diasporic Literary Archives Network. He has written reviews, essays, pamphlets, conference papers and two books on subjects related to the history of food, and has been a trustee and officer of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Early life and education Sutton was born in Farnborough, Hampshire on 18 October 1950. His mother was Sheila Sutton, née Bourroughs. His father, Derek John Sutton, was in 1950 a student at the University of Reading, working as a trainee teacher at the E. P. Collier School in Reading.