Ben Markovits

Ben Markovits grew up in Texas, London, Oxford and Berlin. His first job after university was playing professional basketball for a 2nd division team in Germany. Since then he has worked as a high school teacher, an editor at New Left Review, and has written articles, stories, poems and reviews for journals including the New York Times, Esquire, the London Review of Books, and the Guardian. In 2008, he was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard and won a Pushcart Prize for a story published in the Paris Review. In 2013, Granta selected him as one of their Best British Novelists Under 40. His novel You Don't Have to Live Like This won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2016. The Rest of Our Lives, his most recent novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2025. He lives in London and is a professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway.