Simon Kuper

Simon Kuper (born in Kampala, Uganda in 1969) was educated at Oxford University and Harvard. He has been working for the Financial Times since 1994, and now writes a general column for the newspaper. 

He is a British-French dual citizen who lives with his wife and three children in Paris. He is the author of several books including Football Against the Enemy (winner of the William Hill prize for Sports Book of the Year 1994), Ajax, The Dutch, The War: Football in Europe During the Second World War (2003), and – as co-author with Stefan Szymanski – Soccernomics (2009). 

His recent books include The Happy Traitor, his biography of the double agent George Blake (2021) and Barça: The Rise and Fall of the Club that Invented Modern Football (2021), which won the Sunday Times award for Football Book of the Year. His Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK, appeared in 2022 and became a Sunday Times bestseller. His Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Century is scheduled to appear in April 2024. 

He has won several awards for his journalism, ranging from the Manuel Vázquez Montalbán prize for sportswriting in 2008 to the British Society of Magazine Editors’ prize for Columnist of the Year in 2016 and 2020.