Giles Smith

Giles Smith was born in Colchester in 1962. He was the keyboard player in a pop group called The Cleaners From Venus but reluctantly resigned himself to working as a journalist when The Cleaners didn’t go global. His failure to make it as a musician was the topic of his first book, Lost in Music (1995), and has been the subtext of anything he has said or done since.

In the Nineties, he worked as a feature writer for The Independent. He now writes for The Times. He was named Sports Columnist of the Year in 1998. A collection of his sports writing, Midnight in the Garden of Evel Knieval, was published in November 2000.

His writing has appeared in many British publications and in The New Yorker. He contributed a monologue to the Nick Hornby-edited short story collection Speaking with the Angel. He lives in south London with his partner, the writer Sabine Durrant, and their children.