Simon Kuper is a South African-British author. He writes about sports “from an anthropologic perspective.”
Kuper was born in Uganda of South African parents and moved to Leiden in the Netherlands as a child, where his father, Adam Kuper, was a lecturer in anthropology at Leiden University. He is named for his grandfather—Adam Kuper’s father—who was a South African Supreme Court judge assassinated in 1963. He has lived in 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.
Books in order of publication:
Football Against the Enemy – 1994
Ajax, the Dutch, the War: Football in Europe During the Second World War – 2003
Soccer Men: Profiles of the Rogues, Geniuses, and Neurotics Who Dominate the World’s Most Popular Sport – 2011
The Barcelona Complex: Lionel Messi and the Making–And Unmaking–Of the World’s Greatest Soccer Club – 2021
Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK – 2022
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