Mike Marqusee (;Mukul Kesevan, "Stumbling out of Zionism." 27 January 1953 – 13 January 2015) was an American writer, journalist, and political activist in London.
Life and career
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". Marqusee, who described himself as a "deracinated New York Marxist Jew", lived in Britain from 1971.
He wrote mainly about politics, popular culture, the Indian sub-continent and cricket, and was a regular correspondent for, among others, The Guardian, Red Pepper, and The Hindu. After he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2007, he wrote extensively on health issues, and in defence of the National Health Service. His book The Price of Experience: Writings on Living with Cancer was published in 2014.
Marqusee was the editor of Labour Left Briefing, an executive member of the Stop the War Coalition and the Socialist Alliance, and wrote for Left Unity. He was also a leading figure in Iraq Occupation Focus.Iraq Occupation Focus In 2014, he was working on a proposed biography of the writers Tom Paine and William Blake.
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".Steen, Rob. "Cricket minus the cliches: War Minus the Shooting." Cricinfo. 23 August 2008. (accessed December 12, 2008). Rob Steen wrote that, before it was published, "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." Duncan Campbell of The Guardian wrote: "One of the best books ever written on cricket, Anyone But England, is by an American writer, Mike Marqusee."Duncan Campbell "Stumped by curveballs", The Guardian, 19 January 2009
Personal life Marqusee's partner was Liz Davies, a barrister.Mike Marqusee "Ten years on: a comment on the British SWP", mikemarqusee.co.uk, 10 January 2013 He died in January 2015, aged 61, of multiple myeloma.
Partial works Slow Turn (Sphere, 1988) Defeat from the Jaws of Victory: Inside Kinnock's Labour Party (co-author with Richard Heffernan) (Verso Books, 1992). War Minus the Shooting: A Journey through South Asia during Cricket's World Cup (Mandarin, 1997). Chimes of Freedom: the Politics of Bob Dylan's Art (The New Press, 2003). Anyone but England: An Outsider Looks at English Cricket (Aurum Press, 2005), Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties (Verso Books, 2005). Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the Sixties (Seven Stories Press, 2006). . "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"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. If I Am Not for Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew (Verso, 2008). An extract appeared in The Guardian."The first time I was called a self-hating Jew", The Guardian, 4 March 2008. "Why I Became British" (The Guardian, 16 February 2010)"Why I Became British", The Guardian, 16 February 2010. "I Don't Need a War to Fight My Cancer" (The Guardian, 28 December 2009) "I don't need a war to fight my cancer", The Guardian, 28 December 2009. 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)."Fifty Years of Bob Dylan's Stark Challenge to Liberal Complacency", The Guardian, February 2014.
References
External links , Mike Marqusee's official website Colin Robinson, Mike Marqusee obituary, The Guardian, 15 January 2015.