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

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (March 2016)

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 Wrestling (1996)
• 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)[5]
• To the Letter: A Curious History of Correspondence – A Celebration of the Lost Art of Letter Writing (Canongate, 2013)[6]
• (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 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020)
• All the Knowledge in the World : The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopaedia (Orion Publishing, 2022)

Critical studies, reviews and biography

• Schama, Chloë (January 2013). "Review of On the map". Books. Smithsonian. 43 (9): 72.[7]

References

External links

• Official website
• Works by or about Simon Garfield in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Our Hidden Lives, 2005 film-page
• The Unfolding Story of Maps: Dragon Warnings to Smartphone Screens (Published 2012) Janet Maslin, The New York Times, 18 December 2012
• Video of Garfield's interview with Colbert