Ed Hawkins

Ed Hawkins is an award-winning author and journalist, renowned for deep-dive investigations. He has written numerous books and his work has appeared in The Times, the Guardian, Daily Mail and many other publications.

He recently wrote Why We Kneel, How We Rise with Michael Holding (Simon & Schuster, 2021), a vital book on racism and re-education, featuring leading Black sporting heroes from around the world, which won the prestigious William Hill Sports Book of the Year award. His biography of Kylian Mbappe, for Scholastic’s Football Heroes series, was also published in 2021 and was followed by a biography of Gareth Southgate in the same series in 2022.

The Men on Magic Carpets: Searching for the Superhuman Sports Star (Bloomsbury, 2019) is the bizarre story of how a group of US west coast hippies believed they could create a real-life comic-book superhero with extraordinary powers through meditation and yoga, and how they helped end the Cold War. For Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy (Bloomsbury, 2013), which exposed match-fixing in cricket, Hawkins worked undercover in the illegal, mafia-run Indian gambling industry. It won Wisden Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year. The Lost Boys (Bloomsbury, 2015) was a critically acclaimed piece of investigative journalism. Posing as a football agent in Cyprus and Africa, Hawkins infiltrated people traffickers to highlight the slave trade in the sport, bringing down the charity which was supposed to be preventing it and highlighting corruption in Fifa. Sporting Chancer (Pitch, 2012), his first book, was nominated for Best New Writer at the 2012 British Sports Book Awards. He also was Michael Holding’s ghostwriter for No Holding Back (Orion, 2011).

He has won three Sports Journalist Association Awards.