Owen Hatherley was born in Southampton, England in 1981. He received a PhD in 2011 from Birkbeck College, London, for a thesis on Constructivism and Americanism, which was published in 2016 as The Chaplin Machine (Pluto Press); he has had scholarly articles published in the Journal of Architecture, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, among others. He writes regularly for Architectural Review, Calvert Journal, Dezeen, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, New Humanist, and Prospect, and is the author of several 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), which was set to music by the group Golau Glau; Landscapes of Communism (Penguin 2015), The Ministry of Nostalgia (Verso, 2016) and the forthcoming Trans-Europe Express (Penguin 2017). He also edited and introduced an updated edition of Ian Nairn’s Nairn’s Towns (Notting Hill Editions, 2013), and wrote texts for the exhibition Brutalust: Celebrating Post-War Southampton, at the K6 Gallery. He lives in Woolwich.