Andrew O’Hagan

Andrew O’Hagan is the LRB’s editor at large. He is the author of seven novels – Our Fathers, Personality, Be Near Me, The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, The Illuminations, Mayflies and Caledonian Road – and three books of non-fiction: The Missing, The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America and The Secret Life: Three True Stories (which contains his LRB pieces on Julian Assange, creating a fake identity online and the search for Satoshi Nakamoto). His first piece for the LRB, a Diary about James Bulger’s murder and the cruelty of children to other children, appeared in 1993, when he was working as an editor at the paper (in 2010 he wrote about Jon Venables’s rearrest). He has written more than a hundred and fifty pieces for the LRB since then, on subjects including begging, the sinking of his grandfather’s ship, the murder of the Irish solicitor Rosemary Nelson, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller, the end of British farming, Jonathan Franzen, hating football, Scotland’s sense of grievance, the Democratic and Republican National Conventions of 2004 and the Republican one of 2024, poetry anthologies, the 7/7 bombing outside the LRB’s old offices, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, what happens to our rubbish, a driving holiday with Seamus Heaney and the LRB’s first editor, Karl Miller, Jimmy Savile and the BBC, Norman Mailer, the Daily Mail, the Grenfell disaster, Robert Louis Stevenson in Bournemouth and in Edinburgh, old Soho, the New Romantics and Prince Harry.

Off His Royal Tits: On Prince Harry

Andrew O’Hagan, 2 February 2023

Harry will allow no contradiction and no variance – ‘Recollections may vary,’ the late queen said – and only when his wider family shows that it ‘deeply appreciates’ the truth of what he’s gone through will ‘reconciliation’ be possible. Harry says, in his Montecito meets TikTok kind of way, that ‘forgiveness is 100 per cent a possibility,’ and that he’s ‘open’ to helping the royal family understand its own unconscious bias. It must be quite annoying, if you’re them. You don’t have to be Baudrillard to feel that Harry’s idea of the truth is simplistic, and that he’s become a bit of a fundamentalist: anything that isn’t ‘my truth’ is automatically part of the big lie. Harry has set out to convince the world that his family are professional liars, with one or two saving graces, such as heavenly anointment. And he’s not wrong.

Short Cuts: I Think We’re Alone Now

Andrew O’Hagan, 15 December 2022

Ionce​ drove to Forest Lawn Memorial Park. It was before Michael Jackson had his crypt there, but I remember finding Walt Disney’s grave and that of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore. A few writers are there too: Theodore Dreiser, who wrote well about department stores in Sister Carrie, and Clifford Odets, who believed shopping was one of America’s chronic diseases....

From The Blog

The Death Parade

9 September 2022

Overnight, the newspapers got in on the act, behaving as if history were simply a concatenation of our large feelings. ‘Our Hearts Are Broken,’ the Daily Mail screams. ‘How to find the words? Our grief is a hundred different emotions, all of them hard to grasp.’ (Is shame an emotion, and is it hard to grasp?) ‘We Loved You, Ma’am,’ roars the Sun, which changed its banner from red to purple. It seems consistent with the general nullity that the papers emoting most extravagantly are the ones that made the queen suffer the most.

Deadheaded Sentences: A Disservice to Dolly

Andrew O’Hagan, 4 August 2022

For scholars​ of heartbreak and trepidation, the Dolly Parton songbook is a core text. No other singer would say ‘please’ when begging Jolene not to take her man. In Country Music, Ken Burns’s recent documentary series, Parton insists a great song is like an heirloom or a keepsake, essentially a piece of storytelling. A well-written song can dramatise a wonderful character...

A Cosmos Indoors: My Kingdom for a Mint Cracknel

Andrew O’Hagan, 21 April 2022

What​ I most wanted was a SodaStream. A person with a SodaStream was in charge of his destiny to a pretty awesome degree. Same with the Breville sandwich toaster. Instead of a slice of Scottish Pride smeared in beef paste, you could go your own way, killing it softly, taking over the kitchen and incinerating a few squares of plastic cheese and a bit of ham in a sarcophagus before hitting the...

Podcasts & Videos

Podcast

Sisters Come Second

Colm Tóibín, Andrew O’Hagan and Malin Hay

18 April 2023

In his introduction to our twelfth LRB Collection, Sisters Come Second, Colm Tóibín writes that most siblings dream of being only children. Malin Hay explores this idea with Colm and Andrew O’Hagan,...

Podcast

Analogous Patisseries

Mary-Kay Wilmers and Andrew O’Hagan

23 February 2021

Mary-Kay Wilmers, who retired as editor of the LRB last month, talks to Andrew O’Hagan about her career, first at Faber and Faber, then the Listener, then for 42 years at the London Review of Books....

Video

The LRB at 40

Mary-Kay Wilmers, Alan Bennett, Andrew O’Hagan, John Lanchester, Yun Sheng and Nicholas Spice

11 October 2019

We look back at 40 years of the LRB in our anniversary event at Conway Hall.

Podcast

Hands-On History

Andrew O’Hagan, Linda Colley and R.W. Johnson

19 August 2011

Andrew O’Hagan chaired this discussion between Linda Colley, R.W. Johnson and Tom Devine about national histories and the ways they should, and should not, be taught.

Pieces about Andrew O’Hagan in the LRB

Most Sincerely, Folks: Andrew O’Hagan

Michael Wood, 5 June 2003

About a third of the way through his first book, The Missing, Andrew O’Hagan pauses over a perception he thinks his readers may find ‘a bit surprising’. It’s an intricate...

Read more reviews
See all contributors

Download the LRB app

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences