Simon Garfield
Simon Frank Garfield (born 19 March 1960[1]) is a British journalist and non-fiction author.
Biography
Garfield was born in London in 1960.[2] He was educated at the independent University College School in Hampstead, London, and the London School of Economics, where he was executive editor of The Beaver. He won the Guardian/NUS 'Student Journalist of the Year' award in 1981, and the same year he became a sub-editor at the Radio Times.[1] He wrote scripts for BBC radio documentaries in the early 1980s.[1] He also wrote for Time Out magazine, acting as editor from 1988 to 1989.[1] He has written for newspapers such as The Independent, The Independent on Sunday, and The Observer, and was named Mind Journalist of the Year in 2005.[1] He was among the clients of Pat Kavanagh at United Agents.
He is the author of several books including Expensive Habits: The Dark Side of the Industry, the Somerset Maugham Prize-winning The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of AIDS, The Wrestling, The Nation's Favourite: The True Adventures of Radio 1, and Mauve.[2]
In 2010 his book Just My Type was published, exploring the history of typographic fonts.[3][4]
Garfield appeared on 25 February 2013 episode of The Colbert Report to discuss why he wrote On the Map.
Garfield's book To the Letter: A Curious History of Correspondence is the inspiration behind the charity event Letters Live.
Bibliography
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Books
- Garfield, Simon (1986). Expensive habits: the dark side of the music industry. London: Faber.
- Money for Nothing: Greed and Exploitation in the Music Industry (1986)
- The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of AIDS (1994)
- The Nation's Favourite: The True Adventures of Radio One (1998) – (account of turmoil at BBC radio station)
- Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World (2000) – (Victorian chemist William Perkin and his development of synthetic dyes), W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN 0-393-02005-3
- The Last Journey of William Huskisson (2002) – (pioneering development of steam railways in Britain)
- Our Hidden Lives: The Everyday Diaries of a Forgotten Britain (2004) – (interwoven threads from five diaries from post-World War II Britain)
- We are at War: The Remarkable Diaries of Five Ordinary People (2005) – (interwoven accounts from five diaries from the period preceding World War II)
- Private Battles: Our Intimate Diaries – How the War Almost Defeated Us (2006) – (interwoven accounts from four diaries of ordinary Britains living through World War II)
- The Error World: An Affair With Stamps (2008) – (memoir of the author's stamp collecting obsession)
- The Wrestling – (British wrestling and its eccentric performers and fans)
- Exposure: The Unusual Life and Violent Death of Bob Carlos Clarke (2009) – (Irish photographer and suicide)
- Mini: The True and Secret History of the Making of a Motor Car (2009)
- Just My Type: A Book About Fonts (Profile Books Ltd, 2010)
- On the Map: Why the World Looks the Way it Does (Profile Books Ltd, 2012)
- To the Letter: A Curious History of Correspondence – A Celebration of the Lost Art of Letter Writing (Canongate, 2013)[5]
- (as editor) A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt. (Canongate, 2015)
- Timekeepers: How The World Became Obsessed With Time (Canongate, 2016)
- In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate The World (Canongate, 2018)
- Dog's Best Friend : A Brief History of an Unbreakable Bond (Profile, 2021)
Critical studies, reviews and biography
- Schama, Chloë (January 2013). "Review of On the map". Books. Smithsonian. 43 (9): 72.[6]
References
- ^ a b c d e "Simon Garfield, Esq", Debrett's, retrieved 6 July 2011
- ^ a b "Simon Garfield", Faber & Faber, retrieved 6 July 2011
- ^ Gompertz, Will (2010) "Gomp/arts: Simon Garfield: A man of letters", BBC, 18 October 2010, retrieved 6 July 2011
- ^ Glancey, Jonathan (2010) "Just My Type by Simon Garfield and Manuale Tipographico by Giambattista Bodoni – review", The Guardian, 4 December 2010, retrieved 6 July 2011
- ^ Garfield, Simon (25 October 2013). "Simon Garfield: in praise of the letter". Retrieved 21 October 2020 – via www.theguardian.com.
- ^ Smithsonian often changes the title of a print article when it is published online. This article is titled "The history of mapmaking, Jared Diamond’s latest and more recent books reviewed" online.
External links
- 1960 births
- Living people
- English male journalists
- English non-fiction writers
- People educated at University College School
- Rail transport writers
- English male non-fiction writers
- 20th-century British journalists
- 20th-century British non-fiction writers
- 20th-century English male writers
- 21st-century British journalists
- 21st-century British non-fiction writers
- 21st-century British male writers
- Journalists from London