Benjamin Markovits was born in 1973 and grew up in Texas, London and Berlin. He left an unpromising career as a professional basketball player to study the Romantics – an experience he wrote about in Playing Days, a novel. Since then he has taught high school English, worked at a left-wing cultural magazine, and written essays, stories and reviews for, among other publications, The New York Times, Esquire, Granta, The Guardian, The London Review of Books and The Paris Review. He has published several novels including You Don't Have To Live Like This, which won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2016. In 2009 he was a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and won a Pushcart Prize for his short story “Another Sad, Bizarre Chapter in Human History.” In 2013, Granta selected him as one of their 'Best of Young British Novelists' and in 2015 he won the Eccles British Library Writer in Residence Award.  A Weekend in New York was longlisted for the JQ Wingate Prize and the sequel, Christmas in Austin, was published in 2019 by Faber & Faber. His most recent novel, The Sidekick, was published in 2022. He lives in London and teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Website: www.benjaminmarkovits.com

Books in order of publication:

The Syme Papers (2004)

Either Side of Winter (2005)

Imposture (2007)

A Quiet Adjustment (2008)

Fathers (2008)

Playing Days (2010)

Childish Loves (2011)

You Don’t Have to Live Like This (2015)

A Weekend in New York (2018)

Christmas in Austin (2019)

Home Games (2020)

The Sidekick (2022)