In the 1980s he worked for the National Council for Voluntary Organisations in London, and was self-employed as a writer, broadcaster and occasional consultant between 1987 and 2000.
He has written for many journals and newspapers, including The Guardian, where he was a contracted feature writer in the early 1990s.
More recently, he has held a Mellon Fellowship at Tate Britain and, together with Timothy Hyman, curated a major Stanley Spencer exhibition.
Patrick Wright is a former presenter of Radio 3's arts programme Night Waves.
His latest book, The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness, explores the East German writer Uwe Johnson and his unexpected residence on the Isle of Sheppey between 1974 and his death in 1984, taking his appreciation of "backwaters" as the basis for a consideration of deindustrialisation and its more recent consequences in England and elsewhere.