Benjamin Markovits

Benjamin Markovits grew up in Texas, London and Berlin. He studied literature at Yale, and left an unpromising career as a professional basketball player to study the Romantics at Oxford, and drew from the experience for his 2010 novel Playing Days. His new book, You Don't Have to Live Like This, about an experimental community in Detroit, just won the prestigious James Tait Black prize in the UK, award at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.