AMY RAPHAEL BIO

I have been writing about popular culture and sport for more than three decades. Recent books include my first middle-grade novel, The Forest of Moon and Sword, published by Hachette Children’s Group in January 2020, A Game of Two Halves: Famous Football Fans Meet Their Heroes and A Seat at the Table: Women on the Frontline of Music.

I also co-wrote Steve Coogan’s autobiography, Easily Distracted and worked with David Hare on his memoir, The Blue Touch Paper. My previous books include the official biographies of Danny Boyle and Mike Leigh, alongside 1995’s Never Mind the Bollocks: Women Rewrite Rock (with a foreword by Debbie Harry).

As a journalist, I have interviewed around a thousand pop culture icons, including Kurt Cobain at 2am in New York, after an insurrectionary gig at Roseland; Patti Smith in Paris for an unexpected and quite astonishing 24 hours; George Best in Belfast, when he finally remembered to turn up; Bobby Robson at the Camp Nou while he was managing Barcelona; Christopher Walken on a dodgy phone line that kept going dead; Philip Seymour Hoffman in a greasy spoon in New York and myriad others from Bill Bailey to Bill Nighy, from Ian Rankin to George Pelecanos, from Gerald Scarfe to Sir Peter Blake.

Previous staff jobs include features editor of both The Face and Elle, followed by over five years as both editor-at-large and sports editor of Esquire. I have also written for all the UK broadsheets as well as The Radio Times, NME, Rolling Stone and Sight and Sound.