Owen Hatherley was born in Southampton, England in 1981. He received a PhD from Birkbeck College in 2011 for the thesis The Political Aesthetics of Americanism, which was published in 2016 as The Chaplin Machine (Pluto Press).
He writes regularly on architecture, culture and politics for Architectural Review, the Guardian, Jacobin and the London Review of Books, among others. He has published the following books: Militant Modernism (Zero, 2009), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010), Uncommon – An Essay on Pulp (Zero, 2011), Across the Plaza (Strelka, 2012), A New Kind of Bleak (Verso 2012), Landscapes of Communism (Penguin, 2015), The Ministry of Nostalgia (Verso, 2016), Trans-Europe Express (Penguin, 2018), The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space (Repeater, 2018), Soviet Metro Stations (with Christopher Herwig, Fuel, 2019), Red Metropolis (Repeater, 2020), and the forthcoming Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances (Verso 2021) and Modern Buildings in Britain (Penguin, 2021).
Hatherley is also the editor of The Alternative Guide to the London Boroughs (Open House, 2020). He has edited and introduced an updated edition of Ian Nairn's Nairn's Towns (Notting Hill Editions, 2013), written texts for the exhibition Brutalust: Celebrating Post-War Southampton at the K6 Gallery, and introduced William Morris' How I Became A Socialist (Verso, 2020). Between 2006 and 2010 he wrote the blog 'Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy'. He is the culture editor of Tribune.
