Biography
I was born in a village in South Yorkshire on February 13 1966. My dad worked a small tenanted farm with his dad, and my mum worked in the village grocery until she had me. In 1970 my grandfather was killed in a tractor accident, and we moved to another farm on the East Yorkshire wolds, where I grew up with one sister and one brother. Most people we knew expected me to grow up to farm with my dad, but I didn't have many skills in that area, and my brother went on to do that instead.
I studied English Literature in London, and then worked as a reporter on the Beverley Guardian newspaper in Yorkshire. It might just be nostalgia, but I think this was the job I most enjoyed doing; how could you not enjoy a job in the course of which you spent every Thursday in a different village, ambling around or talking to people in the pub until you found some stories for next week's "Village in Focus" feature? I once broke a story about the theft of ducks from a pond in a village called Etton that was taken up by the mighty Yorkshire Post. In June 1989 I had to ring Beverley's Chinese takeaway and ask what the owners thought about the Tiananmen Square protests. He didn't want to talk about it.
I moved to London and worked for various publications until I got a job at The Face in 1993. I became the editor in 1995, which was fortunate because British pop culture was having a periodic boom. The magazine won awards and achieved record circulation figures (which largely due to Sheryl's work, to be honest), and I got asked to write a lot of social comment and observation pieces for the newspapers. The Guardian called me "one of Britain's leading social commentators", which has useful for biographies such as this. I got promoted to Group Editor of The Face, Arena, Arena Homme Plus and Frank, edited a collection of writing about popular culture called Nightfever, and was then sacked when a multi-national corporation took over the company in 1999.
At the same time, my dad, brother and mum had to sell off the farm, and between freelancing and doing bits of consultancy for business, I went back up to try to help and offer a bit of support. This changed how I felt about a lot of things. I wrote about it all in a memoir called The Farm; The Story of One Family and the English Countryside, published by Hamish Hamilton in 2005. It was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book of the Year award, chosen as a Richard and Judy bookclub choice and became a number one bestseller in the UK. It has also been adapted for a stage production.
I am now working on a new book about a century in the life of a family in the Yorkshire coalfield, to be published by Bloomsbury in 2008, and I write about popular culture, society and the countryside for a variety of publications, including The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The New York Times, Vogue, GQ and British Farmer and Grower.
I live with my wife Laura and daughter Violet in Kentish Town in north London. I support York City and Leeds United football clubs, and my favourite animal is a West of England goose.