Steve Howell

Steve Howell is a journalist and author of four books, his latest being Cold War Puerto Rico, which is due to be published by the University of Massachusetts Press on May 1, 2026 and is available for pre-order now.

Steve's account of the UK's 2017 General Election - Game Changer: Eight Weeks That Transformed British Politics – was a Guardian political book of the year in 2018. He is also author of two novels: Over The Line (2015), which tells the story of an Olympic athlete caught up in a drugs scandal, and Collateral Damage (2021), a political thriller set in Libya, London and Lebanon in the 1980s.

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Steve has appeared as a political commentator on the BBC, ITV, Sky News, LBC and in podcasts for The Times, Guardian and Daily Mirror. He has also contributed Op-Eds, features and reviews to The Nation, Jacobin, Big Issue, Tribune and the Guardian.

A graduate of Sheffield University, he has worked as a campaigner and media consultant before concentrating on writing. Born in Wallasey, England, he has dual UK-US citizenship and family on both sides of the Atlantic. He lives in Wales with his wife, Kim.

Contemporary novelists Steve admires include Attica Locke, Kamila Shamsie, Jane Smiley, Mohsin Hamid and Pete Dexter. He likes the gritty realism of much US literature, particularly as seen in the work of the great Californian writers John Steinbeck and Dashiell Hammett.