Simon Kuper

Who is Simon Kuper?

Simon Kuper is a British author. He writes about sports "from an anthropologic perspective."

Kuper was born in Uganda of South African parents in 1969, and moved to Leiden in the Netherlands as a child, where his father, Adam Kuper, was a lecturer in anthropology at Leiden University. He has also lived in South Africa, Stanford, California, Berlin and London. He studied History and German at Oxford University, and attended Harvard University as a Kennedy Scholar. He now lives in Paris with his family.

He won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year in 1994 with his book Football Against the Enemy, which was later released in the United States as Soccer Against the Enemy. He has also written for The Observer and The Guardian, and is currently a sports columnist for the Financial Times.

In 2003 he published his book Ajax, The Dutch, the War: Football in Europe during the Second World War. He co-authored the 2009 book Soccernomics with Stefan Szymanski. Kuper usually writes about football, discussing the culture that surrounds it — such as the Old Firm rivalry — as well as the on-field play.