Our go editor John Fairbairn is originally from Newcastle upon Tyne but
has long lived in London, where he works as a journalist and translator.
Both vocations have been blessings to his interest in board games.
Specialising in Oriental languages, he has been able to mine one of the
most fruitful areas of research in the games field, and as a political
journalist covering world summits he has been fortunate enough to study
many games in their natural habitats.
He has written perhaps the best,
and best selling, English book on shogi (Shogi for Beginners; 2nd
edition still available from Kiseido), one product of a fruitful 11-year
stint with The Shogi Association filling their magazine with
translations and original research on the shogi variants.
During this
period he also worked on what was then the world's strongest shogi
program, and also a xiangqi program, with the MSO's David Levy.
But he has been a go player since before university days, over 30 years
ago, and it is still his first love. He has written about the game
constantly, with many original features in Go World. These include the
first substantial expositions of ancient Chinese, ancient Korean and
Tibetan go in English.
He has also translated over a dozen go books for
Ishi Press, Kiseido and Yutopian, and is author of the massive
Dictionary of Go Names.
In his younger days, he taught, at Newcastle University, a Japanese
course based on computer research and has never lost his passion for
computers.
He writes go software and collects games with friend Mark
Hall for an informal partnership called Games of Go on Disk. This
includes the popular GoScorer, soon to be made available on this site.
Our go editor John Fairbairn is originally from Newcastle upon Tyne but
has long lived in London, where he works as a journalist and translator.
Both vocations have been blessings to his interest in board games.