Simon Kuper joined the Financial Times in 1994, not as a sportswriter. He ended up writing the daily currencies column and was driven out by tedium in 1998. He returned in 2002 as a sports columnist and has been there ever since, occasionally allowed out of his sports box to write about books, the Netherlands or other subjects.

Simon was born in Uganda and grew up in London, the Netherlands, the US, Sweden and Jamaica. He studied at Oxford, Harvard and the Technische Universität of West Berlin. His first book, Football Against the Enemy (1994), set him on a path of writing about sport with an anthropologist’s eye. His column in the FT tries to place sport and sportsmen within a country, a time, a society, while also being about sport itself.

Later he wrote Ajax, the Dutch, the War: Football in Europe during the Second World War (2003), and Retourtjes Nederland (2006), which is an inside-outsider’s view in Dutch of the changes in Dutch society in recent years. He now lives in Paris with his wife and daughter. - -

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