Lynne Walker (critic)

Lynne Walker (24 October 1956 – 10 February 2011) was a British music and theatre critic who also had experience as a broadcaster.

Born in Edinburgh, she attended the Mary Erskine School. She won a medal at the end of her time at Napier College in 1976,^[1] and gained a degree from the Huddersfield School of Music (now part of Huddersfield University).^[2] It was at this time that Walker became drawn to the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and gained a scholarship to study choral conducting in France under Arthur Oldham.^[1]

Her early career was as a musician, but she migrated to marketing and publicity in the early 1980s working for the Scottish National Orchestra and later for the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester (1987–94).^[3] In 1991 she began her own editorial consultancy Edgewise with the music critic Gerald Larner, whom she had married in 1989. Simultaneously she had begun a freelance career in journalism and broadcasting. For about a decade, until the programme was dropped in 1998, she was a contributor to (and for its last two years presenter) of the BBC Radio 4 arts magazine Kaleidoscope.^[3] She also hosted the Radio 3 programme In Tune.

By 2000 she was a more regular contributor to The Independent, responsible for the newspaper's coverage of theatre events at the Edinburgh Festival, feature articles and arts criticism^[2] with an emphasis on the north of England.

Lynne Walker died in Alderley Edge, Cheshire having suffered from cancer.^[3]

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