Simon Garfield

London-based writer Simon Garfield is a social historian and the author or editor of more than 20 books of non-fiction. His bestsellers include Just My Type, On The Map, Mauve and the Wrestling. His next book, The Pen: A Human History, will be published in autumn 2026.

Garfield writes with wit and literary flair. His titles often reflect the tensions between the analogue and digital worlds, examining what we have lost and gained over the last twenty years. His books cover a diverse array of subjects, ranging from the award-winning history of Aids in Britain, The End of Innocence, to a history of letter writing, which was one of the inspirations for the theatre show Letters Live with Benedict Cumberbatch.

His other labour of love is A Notable Woman, the edited lifetime journals of the remarkable Jean Lucey Pratt, whom readers first met (when she was named Maggie Joy Blunt) in Garfield's three popular collections of diaries from the Mass Observation Archive. Jean began her journal in 1925 when she was 15, and maintained it until a few weeks before her death in 1986.

Much of Garfield's work considers topics we may often take for granted. Timekeepers examines the history of our ever-accelerating world, and his last book, All the Knowledge in the World, is a history of the encyclopaedia from Ancient Greece to Wikipedia.

Simon Garfield was born in London in 1960. His supports the typeface Albertus and the football club Chelsea. He enjoys the work of Tracy Kidder, Elizabeth Strout, Michael Chabon and Kate Atkinson, and is seldom disappointed by The Kills, The National, Elvis Costello or Lucy Dacus.