Benjamin Markovits

Benjamin Markovits is an American-British novelist born in 1973 in Stanford, California. He is the son of a former NFL player and has lived in Austin, Texas; Berlin; Germany; and London, where he teaches at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has written extensively about basketball in both fiction and nonfiction. His novels include the Romantic trilogy — Imposture (2007), A Quiet Adjustment (2008), and Childish Loves (2011) — dealing with the lives of Byron, Annabella Milbanke, and Leigh Hunt. You Don't Have to Live Like This (2015), set in Detroit during the city's attempted regeneration under Barack Obama, won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2015. He has also written Playing Days (2012), a memoir-like novel about playing basketball in Germany. Markovits writes about America from the perspective of an outsider-insider: his fiction is consistently interested in the gap between American idealism and social reality. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and The Guardian.