Simon Frank Garfield (born 19 March 1960) is a British journalist and non-fiction author. He has written for publications such as Time Out , The Independent , and The Observer . His early work focused on the music industry, but his books have increasingly delved into niche topics, from British wrestling and the invention of mauve to the history of encyclopedias and typefaces. Garfield is based in London.
Simon Frank Garfield was born in London on 19 March 1960 to Herbert Sidney and Hella Helene ( née Meyer) Garfield. [1] He grew up in a comfortable middle-class family in Hampstead Garden Suburb. His father was born in Hamburg, Germany, but left for London in 1934, changed his name from Garfunkel to Garfield and became a successful city solicitor. Garfield's father died when he was 13, his brother when he was 18 and his mother when he was 19. [2]
Garfield graduated from University College School with a Bachelor of Science. [1] While studying at the London School of Economics, he focused more on writing for The Beaver , the understaffed student newspaper, than his studies, and became joint editor. Garfield later recalled that it was "the best fun you could have apart from student riots," but the staff realized "we'd never have so much journalistic control again". He was awarded Student Journalist of the Year by The Guardian in 1981, which led him to get employed briefly at the Radio Times as subeditor of the BBC Radio 3 listings. [3] [4]
In 1981 and 1982, Garfield worked as a scriptwriter for BBC radio documentaries. He moved on to Time Out , where he served as editor in 1988 and 1989. [1] Garfield often expanded his well-researched articles into books. [2] His first two were on exploitation in the music industry. Money for Nothing: Greed and Exploitation in the Music Industry (1986) was praised by Booklist 's Peter L. Robinson as an "insider's account" which had "all the ingredients that produce a juicy public spectacle." [1] Expensive Habits: The Dark Side of the Music Industry (1986) was based on an article Garfield wrote for Time Out about George Michael's legal action against his record label. [2] In his review for The Listener , Dave Rimmer described Garfield as "one of the few writers in Britain dealing regularly, intelligently and entertainingly with the business of music." [1]
Garfield was a feature writer for The Independent from 1990 to 1996. [1] He wrote the The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of AIDS (1994) when he found that there was no book on the history of AIDS in the United Kingdom while researching an article about the drug AZT. It won the Somerset Maugham Award. [2] In the London Review of Books, Peter Campbell considered the book to be a successful treatment of its subject which was "objective about difficult issues." [1]
Garfield started writing books on more niche topics: including inside views on British wrestling in The Wrestling (1996) and BBC Radio 1 DJs in The Nation's Favourite: The True Adventures of Radio One (1998); and what The New York Times Book Review called a "straightforward and clear" chronicle of William Henry Perkin's life and legacy in Mauve: How One Man Invented a Colour That Changed the World (2006). [1] [2]
Garfield wrote features for The Observer in 2001 and 2002. [1] He wrote a 2004 piece for the paper, "Unhappy Anniversary", which followed the legacy of tranquillisers such as Valium and led Mind to honour him as Journalist of the Year in 2005. [5] In a three-volume anthology —Our Hidden Lives (2004), We Are at War (2005) and Private Battles (2006) — Garfield edited diaries from the archives of Mass-Observation, [2] established in the 1930s to preserve the daily experiences of "ordinary people". [6] He is now a trustee of the archives. [2]
To cope with a midlife crisis and the breakdown of his first marriage, Garfield wrote a memoir about his personal life and passion for stamp collecting. He rediscovered philately in his 40s, spending thousands of pounds on his collection, but was reluctant to talk about the obsession. Garfield had been married to the playwright Diane Samuels since 1987, with whom he had two sons, but had an affair. Though it did not sell well, writing The Error World: An Affair With Stamps (2008), Garfield told The Guardian's Stuart Jeffries, "enabled me to look back, and it enabled me to grow up a bit." He let go of philately and sold his collection for £42,500, purchasing a place in St Ives, Cornwall. [2]
In 2010 his book Just My Type was published, exploring the history of typographic fonts. [7] [8]
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 one of the inspirations behind the charity event Letters Live . [9]
Garfield lives in Hampstead, London, [2] with his wife Justine, a chef. [10] He was previously married to the playwright Diane Samuels.
 |
Sir William Henry Perkin was a British chemist and entrepreneur best known for his serendipitous discovery of the first commercial synthetic organic dye, mauveine, made from aniline. Though he failed in trying to synthesise quinine for the treatment of malaria, he became successful in the field of dyes after his first discovery at the age of 18.
Simon Robert Armitage is an English poet, playwright, musician and novelist. He was appointed Poet Laureate on 10 May 2019. He is professor of poetry at the University of Leeds.
Mauveine, also known as aniline purple and Perkin's mauve, was one of the first synthetic dyes. It was discovered serendipitously by William Henry Perkin in 1856 while he was attempting to synthesise the phytochemical quinine for the treatment of malaria. It is also among the first chemical dyes to have been mass-produced.
Mass-Observation is a United Kingdom social research project; originally the name of an organisation which ran from 1937 to the mid-1960s, and was revived in 1981 at the University of Sussex.
Sir Simon Michael Schama is an English historian and television presenter. He specialises in art history, Dutch history, Jewish history, and French history. He is a Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University.
Mauve is a pale purple color named after the mallow flower. The first use of the word mauve as a color was in 1796–98 according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but its use seems to have been rare before 1859. Another name for the color is mallow, with the first recorded use of mallow as a color name in English in 1611.
Simon James Holliday Gray was an English playwright and memoirist who also had a career as a university lecturer in English literature at Queen Mary, University of London, for 20 years. While teaching at Queen Mary, Gray began his writing career as a novelist in 1963 and, during the next 45 years, in addition to five published novels, wrote 40 original stage plays, screenplays, and screen adaptations of his own and others' works for stage, film and television and became well known for the self-deprecating wit characteristic of several volumes of memoirs or diaries.
Mrs Dale's Diary was the first significant BBC radio serial drama. It was first broadcast on 5 January 1948 on the BBC Light Programme, later BBC Radio 2; it ran until 25 April 1969. A new episode was broadcast each weekday afternoon, with a repeat the following morning. A few days after the final episode, a new serial drama, Waggoners' Walk, took over the time slot.
Robert Patrick Webb is an English comedian, actor and writer. He rose to prominence alongside David Mitchell as the comedy duo Mitchell and Webb.
Lemn Sissay FRSL is a British author and broadcaster. He was the official poet of the 2012 London Olympics, was chancellor of the University of Manchester from 2015 until 2022, and joined the Foundling Museum's board of trustees two years later, having previously been appointed one of the museum's fellows. He was awarded the 2019 PEN Pinter Prize. He has written a number of books and plays.
Michel Faber is a Dutch-born writer of English-language fiction, including his 2002 novel The Crimson Petal and the White, and Under The Skin which was adapted for film by Jonathan Glazer, starring Scarlett Johanssen. His novel for young adults, D: A Tale of Two Worlds, was published in 2020. His book, Listen: On Music, Sound and Us, a non-fiction work about music, came out in October 2023.
Courttia Newland is a British writer of Jamaican and Barbadian heritage.
The British (Open) Tag Team Championship is the top tag team championship contested for throughout the British wrestling circuit. For many years contested for in Brian Dixon's All Star Wrestling. It has recently been revived by Stephen Barker's Rumble Wrestling Promotions.
Peter Nicholas Bradshaw is a British writer and film critic. He has been chief film critic at The Guardian since 1999, and is a contributing editor at Esquire.
Norman Lebrecht is a British music journalist and author who specializes in classical music. He is best known as the owner of the classical music blog Slipped Disc, in which he frequently publishes articles. Unlike other writers on music, Lebrecht rarely reviews concerts or recordings, preferring to report on the people and organizations who engage in classical music. Described by Gilbert Kaplan as "surely the most controversial and arguably the most influential journalist covering classical music", his writings have been praised as entertaining and revealing, while others have accused them of sensationalism and criticized their inaccuracies.
Matt Haig is an English author and journalist. He has written both fiction and non-fiction books for children and adults, often in the speculative fiction genre.
Gregory Woods is a British poet. He was the Chair in Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University from 1998 to 2013. He is the author of five books of literary and LGBT studies criticism, and seven poetry collections.
Jean Lucey Pratt was an English writer and bookseller. She published little during her lifetime and is best known as a diarist. Her anonymous Mass-Observation diaries written in the 1940s were featured in three popular books edited by Simon Garfield. A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt, published in 2015, is derived from private diaries she kept between 1925 and 1986.
Paul Lincoln, also known by the ring name Dr. Death, was an Australian professional wrestler and promoter.
Eric Graham Howe was a British psychiatrist notable for his early, interdisciplinary approach to psychotherapy in the 1930s, featuring elements of psychodynamic psychology, existential phenomenology, Eastern philosophy and Christian spirituality. After serving in World War I, he became interested in Sigmund Freud and decided to study psychiatry. Following medical school, he worked at the Tavistock Clinic in the 1920s and 1930s, and established the Open Way Clinic in the 1950s, later renamed the Langham Clinic. Towards the end of his life, he was known as a practicing Druid. He was the author of more than a dozen books and was influential among a number of writers and psychiatrists, including Israel Regardie, Jean Lucey Pratt, Alan Watts, Henry Miller, and R.D. Laing.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
