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Nigel Slater

English food writer, journalist and broadcaster

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 30, 2026
Entity authorityQ4352760
Source-derived summary

Nigel Slater (born 9 April 1956) is an English food writer, journalist and broadcaster. He has written a column for The Observer Magazine for more than a decade and is the principal writer for the Observer Food Monthly supplement. Prior to this, Slater was a food writer for Marie Claire magazine for five years.

Early life

Nigel Slater was born on 9 April 1956, in Wolverhampton, then in Staffordshire. He was the younger of two sons born to factory owner Cyril "Tony" Slater and housewife Kathleen Slater (née Galleymore). This was his father's second marriage. His mother died of asthma in 1965. In 1971, his father remarried to Dorothy Perrens, dying in 1973.

Slater attended Woodfield Avenue School in Penn, Staffordshire. He moved to Worcestershire as a teenager and attended The Chantry School in Martley, where he enjoyed writing essays and was one of only two boys to take cookery as an O-Level subject.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Nigel Slater” is english food writer, journalist and broadcaster. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Nigel, Slater and English, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1956, 1965, 1971, 1973—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1958-04-09. For this dossier, Nigel, Slater and English is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “english food writer, journalist and broadcaster” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4352760. VIAF identifies the subject as 65106713. The Library of Congress control number is n95065412. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1956, 1965, 1971 and 1973.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Nigel Slater”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Nigel Slater primary sources, Nigel Slater archive and Nigel research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Nigel Slater”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Nigel Slater” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.