Mike Marqusee

Mike Marqusee (born 1953) is an American-born writer, journalist and political activist in London. His partner is the barrister Liz Davies.

Marqusee, who describes himself as a "deracinated New York Marxist Jew" has lived in Britain since 1971. He writes mainly about politics, popular culture, the Indian sub-continent and cricket, and is a regular correspondent for, among others, The Guardian, Red Pepper and The Hindu.

Marqusee has been the editor of Labour Left Briefing, and an executive member of the Stop the War Coalition and the Socialist Alliance. He is also a leading figure in Iraq Occupation Focus.^[1]

Sports writing

An ardent sports fan, Marqusee has won considerable renown for his work on cricket. War Minus the Shooting, his book on the 1996 Cricket World Cup, has been lauded as a "riveting, revelatory and largely run-free account".^[2] Before it was published, wrote Rob Steen, "observations of subcontinental cricket emanating from Britain, and just about every other corner of the so-called old world, tended to be clichéd, wrongheaded, derisive, patronising or just plain racist. Small wonder, then, that it took a London-based American with a rucksack, a notebook and a CLR Jamesian yen for Marxism to supply an overdue corrective."^[2] Duncan Campbell of The Guardian wrote that "One of the best books ever written on cricket, Anyone But England, is by an American writer, Mike Marqusee. "^[3]

Partial bibliography

• Slow Turn (Sphere, 1988) ISBN 978-0-7474-0120-9
• Defeat from the Jaws of Victory: Inside Kinnock’s Labour Party (co-author with Richard Heffernan) (Verso, 1992) ISBN 978-0-86091-561-4
• War Minus the Shooting: a journey through South Asia during cricket’s World Cup (Mandarin, 1997) ISBN 978-0-7493-2333-2
• Chimes of Freedom: the Politics of Bob Dylan’s Art (New Press, 2003) ISBN 978-1-56584-825-2
• Anyone but England: An Outsider Looks at English Cricket (Aurum Press, 2005) ISBN 978-1845130848
• Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties (Verso Books, 2005). ISBN 978-1-84467-527-2
• Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the Sixties (Seven Stories Press, 2006) ISBN 978-1-58322-686-5.
• Imperial whitewash - feelgood versions of British history are blinding us to the ways in which we are even now repeating it ^[4]
• If I Am Not for Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew (Verso, 2008). An extract appeared in The Guardian.^[5]
• "Why I became British" (The Guardian, 16 February 2010) ^[6]
• "I don't need a war to fight my cancer" (The Guardian, 28 December 2009) ^[7]

External links

• Mike Marqusee's homepage

References