Alexander Masters
Biographer
About
Alexander Masters is a biographer, illustrator and journalist with a wide range of interests, from homelessness and diary writing as a source of fiction, to medical ethics and the physics of complex systems. His first book, Stuart: a life backwards (2005) won the Guardian First Book award and the Hawthornden prize. It was the first, full-length biography of a homeless person, and was turned into an HBO/BBC film starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hardy. Alexander’s subsequent biographies have also focused on unknown but remarkable characters. Simon: The Genius in my Basement (2012) combines a biography of his former landlord, the brilliant, reclusive mathematician Simon Norton, with a cartoon introduction to the basics of group theory, the mathematical study of symmetry. A Life Discarded: 148 diaries Found in a Skip (2017) is a biographical mystery story. A biography that begins without knowing who the subject of the biography is, the book describes Alexander’s hunt to discover the author of the discarded diaries. This led to his first collection of short stories, Love, Death & Trousers, based verbatim on the diary entries. Published in The Paris Review, the stories were selected for the Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology (2018).
Since 2013, Alexander has worked also as a patient advocate and medical ethicist, developing new methods to finance clinical trials, particularly for rare diseases. He has published feature articles and academic papers about a number of new ethical funding mechanisms that enable patients to pay to participate in clinical trials, and so rescue research that would otherwise have been lost. For this, he won the Association of British Science Writers Investigative Journalism award (2015) and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Uppsala (2023).
Alexander has an MSc in theoretical physics and is currently working on a second collection of short stories and a graphic memoir about medical ethics and clinical trials.