Alex Renton

Renton was born in Toronto, Canada, on 5 March 1961, the oldest child of the politician Tim Renton, Baron Renton of Mount Harry and the novelist and historian Alice Blanche Helen Fergusson. He was educated at Ashdown House, East Sussex, Eton College, Brighton College and Exeter University.

As a journalist he has held staff jobs as a reporter and editor on British newspapers The Independent and the London Evening Standard. He has been a columnist for The Times and a Scotland-based correspondent for Newsweek magazine. He has won awards for foreign reporting, investigative journalism and food writing.[3] He worked in Asia for Oxfam from 2001 to 2004. There he began writing about food cultures, poverty and food policy. [4]

Renton was presenter and reporter on Exposure – Boarding Schools, the Secret Shame, a 55-minute investigative documentary broadcast by Britain's ITV channel in February 2018.[5]

Renton's book Blood Legacy, an account of his ancestors' involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery in the Caribbean, was long-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize in September 2021.

• 13 Foods that shape our world (2022) ISBN 9781785947384
• Blood Legacy: reckoning with a family's story of slavery (2021) ISBN 9781786898869
• Stiff Upper Lip: secrets, crimes and the schooling of a ruling class (2017) ISBN 9781474600545
• Planet Carnivore: why cheap meat costs the Earth (2014) ISBN 9781536643381

Renton married the journalist Ruth Valerie Burnett in 2002. They have a son and daughter.