Authors XI Cricket Team
Events
Celebrations
The Authors are one of the world’s oldest wandering cricket sides. Emerging from the Authors’ Club, founded in 1891 by Walter Besant as a place for writers to meet and talk, The Authors were revived in 2012 and since then have played around the world. Their book, The Authors XI: A Season of English Cricket from Hackney to Hambledon, was shortlisted for the MCC Cricket Society book of the year award in 2014.
Authors’ XI Cricket Team Members
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Richard Beard’s six novels include Lazarus is Dead, Dry Bones and Damascus, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His most recent novel Acts of the Assassins was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, and he is the author of the 2017 memoir The Day That Went Missing. Formerly Director of The National Academy of Writing in London, he is a Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo, and has a Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia.
Will Burns is Poet-in-Residence at Caught by the River and was named as one of the 4 Faber & Faber New Poets for 2014 with his pamphlet in that series published in October 2014. Will lists in his biography that he has worked in factories, painted houses, cleaned windows, worked in the best record shop in the world and likes sports and ornithology. Will's book, The Paper Lantern, is a philosophical narrative and was published in 2021.
Charlie Campbell is captain of the Authors Cricket Club. He has led this team of writers in well over a hundred consecutive games. He is the author of Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People and, most recently, Herding Cats: The Art of Amateur Cricket Captaincy.
Off the pitch he is a literary agent.
Saadi Chowdrhury read his honours in Economics-International Relations and obtained a master’s in Finance from the University of St Andrews. He was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 2009 by the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple following completion of the law conversion course and the Bar’s vocational qualification. After a stint with the UK’s financial regulator in the City of London, he worked with a boutique investment house, a leading hedge fund and one of UK’s biggest wealth managers. He is passionate about literature and is currently working to finish a fantasy novel set in Iceland.
Charles Cumming was born in Scotland in 1971. Shortly after university. he was approached for recruitment by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), an experience that inspired his first novel, A Spy By Nature. He has written several bestselling thrillers, including A Foreign Country, which won the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for Best Thriller and the Bloody Scotland Crime Book of the Year. His most recent book, Box 88, is the Financial Times, Daily Mail and Spectator's Thriller of the Year.
Tom Eadon ... will be providing his biog soon!
Sebastian Faulks worked as a journalist before becoming a full-time writer. His French trilogy - The Girl at the Lion d'Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray (1989-1997) - established him in the front rank of British novelists. UK sales of Birdsong exceed 2,500,000 copies. Charlotte Gray has also sold over a million copies and was filmed with Cate Blanchett in the main part. His later novels include A Possible Life, Human Traces, On Green Dolphin Street, Engleby, A Week in December, Where My Heart Used to Beat and Paris Echo. Sebastian's most recent book, Snow Country, was published in September 2021.
Peter Fiennes is the author of the critically acclaimed Footnotes, Oak and Ash and Thorn, and To War with God. His latest book, A Thing of Beauty: Travels in Mythical and Modern Greece, is published in October 2021. As the publisher for Time Out, he nurtured a lifelong obsession with old guidebooks, creating award-winning city guides, walking books and titles about Britain's countryside and seaside. He is a director of the annual Urban Tree Festival, an ambassador for The Western Front Way, and lives in south-west London.
William Fiennes is the bestselling author of The Snow Geese and The Music Room. The Snow Geese, published to wide acclaim in 2002, won the Hawthornden Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. On publication in 2009, The Music Room was called “a beautiful and fortifying book, even a great one” (Daily Telegraph). William is co-founder of the charity First Story, which supports creativity and literacy in challenging secondary schools, is an Honorary Vice-President of Epilepsy Action and teaches at Newcastle University. William Fiennes was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.
Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University, Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research and UNESCO Professor of Silk Roads Studies at King’s College, Cambridge. His books include the Silk Roads: A New History of the World, The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World and most recently The Earth Transformed: An Untold History. All have been global bestsellers. Often referred to as a ‘rockstar historian’ (BBC, New Statesman, Der Spiegel), Peter has been called ‘the first great historian of the 21st century’ (DCM Magazine, Brazil).
Nicholas Hogg was nominated for the IMPAC literary award for his début novel, Show Me the Sky. Winner of the New Writing Ventures prize for fiction, and numerous short story contests, his work has also been broadcast by the BBC. His acclaimed third novel, Tokyo, is out now, and Danny Love, his forthcoming novel, is due for release in 2018. He has written on cricket for Wisden, ESPN, The Independent, and the MCC, and is a founder of the revived Authors Cricket Club.
James Holland is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning historian, writer, and broadcaster. The author of a number of best-selling histories including Battle of Britain, Dam Busters, The War in the West, and most recently, Normandy 44, he has also written nine works of historical fiction. He has presented – and written – a large number of television programmes and series and has a weekly WWII podcast with the comedian, Al Murray, called We Have Ways of Making You Talk. He is also Chair of the Chalke Valley History Festival, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow at the University of St Andrew’s
Tom Holland is the best-selling author of Rubicon, which won the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. His books include Persian Fire, Millennium, In the Shadow of the Sword, Dynasty and, most recently, Dominion. His translation of Herodotus' Histories was published by Penguin Classics and a history of Æthelstan was published last year under the Penguin Monarchs series. He has adapted Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Virgil for the BBC. He is the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Making History and has written and presented a number of TV documentaries, on subjects ranging from Islam to dinosaurs. Hedgehog fancier. Stonehenge Saver. The Rest is History podcast presenter.
Jon Hotten is the author of five books, including Muscle and The Years of the Locust, and writes the popular cricket blog The Old Batsman. He co-wrote the award-winning documentary Death of a Gentleman, and his collaboration with the former England bowler Simon Jones, The Test, won the Wisden Almanack's Book of the Year award in 2016. His latest book is The Meaning of Cricket (Yellow Jersey).
Anthony McGowan is the author of two literary thrillers, Stag Hunt and Mortal Coil, and numerous highly acclaimed young adult novels, including Hellbent, Henry Tumour, The Knife That Killed Me (made into film in 2014), The Fall, Brock, Hello Darkness, Pike and Rook. He has also written widely for younger children, including the best-selling Donut Diaries series, a picture book, I Killed Santa, illustrated by Chris Riddell and The Art of Failing; How to Teach Philosophy To Your Dog was published in 2019 and Lark, the conclusion of the quartet with Brock, Pike and Rook, won the prestigious CILIP Carnegie Medal in 2020. Tony's latest book Dogs of the Deadlands was published in 2022 and was shortlisted for the inaugural The Week Junior Book Awards.
David Owen spent 20 years with the Financial Times in a variety of posts in the US, Canada, France and the UK. His last FT role was as Sports Editor. Since 2006, David has operated as a freelance sportswriter and is recognised as a leading authority on the politics, business and history of the modern Olympic Movement. His books include Foinavon: the story of the Grand National's biggest upset, winner of the 2013 Dr Tony Ryan Book Award
Alex Preston is the prize-winning author of four novels, most recently the critically acclaimed Winchelsea. Alex appears regularly on BBC Radio and television. He writes for The Telegraph, Harper’s Bazaar and The Economist as well as for the Observer’s New Review. Alex nurtures a deep and abiding love of Greece and Corfu. He is a long-distance runner and swimmer and traversed the Hellespont as part of the Year of Troy celebrations in 2018 and is planning to undertake the Albania to Corfu swim as soon as we can sign him up. His work is published in Greek by Papadopoulos Publishing and Alex has written a regular monthly column for Epsilon Magazine in Athens.
Dan Richards is an acclaimed non-fiction writer specialising in art, travel and adventure. His first book, Holloway – co-authored with Robert Macfarlane and illustrated by Stanley Donwood – was published in 2013, became a Sunday Times bestseller and has been translated into several languages. Dan’s second book, The Beechwood Airship Interviews, took a journey into the creative process, headspaces and workplaces of some of Britain’s celebrated artists and craftsman including Bill Drummond, Dame Judi Dench, Jenny Saville, Manic Street Preachers and Stewart Lee. 2016's Climbing Days is an exploration of the writing and climbing lives of Dan’s great-great-aunt and uncle and his most recent Outpost is a book about far-flung shelters and eyries, isolation and wilderness. Asking what draws people to the ends of the world, Outpost features visits to Cairngorm bothies, French lighthouses, Japanese shrines, Icelandic sæluhús, fire lookout belvederes in Washington State, Martian pods in Utah, Australian ghost stations, brutalist Swiss treehouses, and hot air balloon odysseys in Svalbard.
Adam Rutherford is a geneticist, writer and broadcaster. He presents BBC Radio 4’s Start The Week, and the Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry. He is the author of seven books, mostly about evolution, genetics and history, race and eugenics, including the bestselling How to Argue With a Racist which is neither controversial nor pugnacious and anyone who disagrees can fight him. His latest is a children’s book called Where Are You Really From?, about human evolution and race and genealogy and that sort of thing. Adam was recently bestowed the Royal Society David Attenborough Award for his contribution to strengthening public confidence in science.
Michael Taylor is an historian of colonial slavery, the British Empire and the British Isles. He graduated from Cambridge with a double first in history. His PhD, which was the first detailed history of the ideas and activities of the British pro-slavery lobby, forms the research basis of this book. He has since worked as a research associate on a project at Tel Aviv University and as Lecturer in Modern British History at Balliol College, Oxford, and is now employed by PWC. He was a champion of University Challenge in 2015 and a finalist in the 2018 series of BBC’s Mastermind.
Matt Thacker is managing editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly and The Nightwatchman, the Wisden Cricket Quarterly. He founded All Out Cricket magazine in 2002 and is managing director of TriNorth, a sports communications agency that provides content for a number of national and international sports governing bodies. He commissions authors from all round the world to write about cricket.
Jonathan Wilson is a football columnist and historian. He writes regularly for the Guardian and Sports Illustrated and founded and edits the Blizzard. He is the author of eleven books on football, including Inverting the Pyramid, his history of football tactics; Angels With Dirty Faces, a footballing history of modern Argentina; and The Names Heard Long Ago, which considers the influence on football of Hungary between the end of the First World War and the 1956 Uprising.
