• ©
  • Caroline Maclean

Benjamin Markovits

Born:
  • California, United States of America
Publishers:

Biography

Benjamin Markovits grew up in Texas, London and Berlin. He studied literature at Yale, and left an unpromising career as a professional basketball player to study the Romantics at Oxford.

Since then he has taught high school English, edited a left-wing cultural magazine and published essays, stories, poetry and reviews on subjects ranging from the Romantics to American sports in The Guardian, Granta, The Paris Review, and The New York Times, among other publications.

He has written seven novels The Syme Papers (2004), Either Side of Winter (2005), Imposture (2007), A Quiet Adjustment (2008), Childish Loves (2010), Playing Days (2011), a fictionalised memoir and You Don't Have to Live Like This (2015). 

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. Granta selected him as one of the Best of Young British Novelists in 2013. Markovits lives in London and is married, with a daughter and a son. He teaches Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Critical perspective

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Bibliography

You Don't Have to Live Like This
Childish Loves
Playing Days: A Novel
A Quiet Adjustment
Imposture
Either Side of Winter
The Syme Papers

Awards

2013
Granta 'Best of Young British Novelists'
2009
Fellowship, Radcliffe Centre for Humanities
2006
Le Prince Maurice Prize