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Jay Rayner (born 1966) is a British journalist, writer and broadcaster.

Rayner is the son of the journalist Claire Rayner and Desmond Rayner. He joined The Observer newspaper after graduating from Leeds University in 1988 where he was editor of the student newspaper. He is currently restaurant critic of The Observer. He has written for a wide range of British newspapers and magazines such as GQ, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, the New Statesman and Granta. In 1992 he was named Young Journalist of the Year in the British Press Awards.

His first novel The Marble Kiss published in 1994 won the Author's Club First Novel Award and his second Day of Atonement (1998) the Jewish Quarterly Prize for Fiction. His first work of non-fiction Stardust Falling was published in 2002 and was followed by his third novel The Apologist, published in the US as Eating Crow, in 2004.

In 1997 he won a Sony Radio Award for Papertalk, BBC Radio Five Live's magazine programme about the newspaper business, which he presented.

He is one of the panel of critics who make up the titular "enemy" on the daytime cookery show Eating with the Enemy, and performs a similar role on the UK version of MasterChef. In addition he is the food reporter on the BBC magazine programme The One Show. He is also on the panel of judges on the American programme Top Chef Masters.

Jay is also a supporter of Sense-National Deafblind and Rubella Association's campaign for older people with sensory loss.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Jay Rayner", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0