Since 2012 he has been Principal Investigator for a project initially funded by the Leverhulme Trust and entitled the Diasporic Literary Archives Network.
Sutton was educated at grammar schools in Stourbridge and Newport, Essex, before reading English at the University of Leicester from 1968 to 1973 (BA 1971, MA 1973).
He is a pescetarian and an atheist (member of the National Secular Society), and lists his hobbies as "badminton, football, walking in Dorset, sitting by the Mediterranean".
In October 1982 Sutton became the senior research officer of a new project based in the University of Reading Library and known as the Location Register of English Literary Manuscripts and Letters.
"[10] Archival papers relating to Sutton's work on the Location Register and WATCH projects are in the Michael Holroyd Collection at the British Library (Add MSS 82027-82029).
At Vincennes he studied food history under Jean-Louis Flandrin, with distinguished colleagues including Claude Fischler, Jeanne Allard and Pedro Cantero Martín.
He contributed to a number of collective projects which were later re-edited and reassembled in Histoire de l'alimentation (Jean-Louis Flandrin, Massimo Montanari).
Returning to the UK in 1980, he published a number of short pieces about food history, before political and archival activities began to take precedence.
He sought to encourage diversity within SLA, and its steering committee, elected in 2015 and re-elected in 2021, has included members from Brazil, Namibia, Portugal, Senegal, and Trinidad and Tobago, as well as Australia, Canada, France and the UK.
His connections in SLA and the ICA Executive Board were instrumental in the setting up and running of the Diasporic Literary Archives Network from 2012 onwards.
It brought together a group of established scholars and experts from a variety of institutional backgrounds, and across different disciplines and regions, to initiate a context in which to practice and scrutinise methodological and conceptual frameworks.
Through a programme of workshops the network sought to establish an international perspective on these issues by examining the complicated and sometimes competing motives of different stakeholders.
It succeeded in establishing new partnerships and new patterns of international solidarity (notably with archivists in Grenada, Namibia, Cameroon, and Trinidad and Tobago) which are expected to continue into the future.