American writer, journalist and political activist
Mike Marqusee (/ˈmɑːrkəsi/;[1] 27 January 1953 – 13 January 2015[2]) was an American writer, journalist and political activist in
London.
Marqusee's first published work was the essay "Turn Left at Scarsdale", written when he was a sixteen-year-old high school student in New York and included in the 1970 collection "High School Revolutionaries".[3]
"Both in the eloquence of his writing and the deep humanism of his vision, Mike Marqusee stands shoulder to shoulder with the spirits of
Isaac Deutscher and
Edward Said." –
Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz.
Sports writing
An ardent sports fan, Marqusee won considerable renown for his work on cricket. War Minus the Shooting, his book on the
1996 Cricket World Cup, has been lauded as a "riveting, revelatory and largely run-free account".[10] Before it was published, wrote Rob Steen, "observations of subcontinental cricket emanating from Britain, and just about every other corner of the so-called old world, tended to be clichéd, wrongheaded, derisive, patronising or just plain racist. Small wonder, then, that it took a London-based American with a rucksack, a notebook and a
CLR Jamesian yen for Marxism to supply an overdue corrective."[10]Duncan Campbell of The Guardian wrote that "One of the best books ever written on cricket, Anyone But England, is by an American writer, Mike Marqusee."[11]
"Imperial whitewash - feelgood versions of British history are blinding us to the ways in which we are even now repeating it", The Guardian, 31 July 2006[12]
If I Am Not for Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew (Verso, 2008). An extract appeared in The Guardian.[13]
"Why I became British" (The Guardian, 16 February 2010)[14]
"I don't need a war to fight my cancer" (The Guardian, 28 December 2009) [15]
Street Music: Poems (Clissold Books, 2012).
The Price of Experience: Writings on Living with Cancer (OR Books, 2014)
"Fifty years of Bob Dylan's stark challenge to liberal complacency" (The Guardian, February 2014).[16]