Martin Knight

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Martin Knight is a British author whose work has encompassed working-class, Romany, football-fan and popular culture, as well as true crime, sport and fiction. He has collaborated with iconic footballers such as George Best, Peter Osgood, Dave Mackay and Charlie Cooke on their best-selling autobiographies.

 

Cushty (2021) was written with gypsy golfer and boxer Joe Smith, the book charting how a disadvantaged Romany boy battled prejudice to make serious inroads in golf and life. The first edition was published as Gypsy Joe and selected as The Observer Sports Book of the Year. 

 

In 2018, Knight co-authored I Ran With The Gang with Bay City Rollers founder-member Alan Longmuir, while the year before he wrote an extended Afterword for seminal footballing autobiography The Working Man’s Ballet, by Chelsea icon Alan Hudson. Justice For Joan, his controversial deep dive into the 1948 unsolved murder of a librarian in Arundel, Sussex, was released in 2016. In 2015, he was one of the contributors to More Raw Material, a tribute to one of Britain’s leading working-class writers, Alan Sillitoe.

 

Martin wrote the introduction to There Ain’t No Justice, the 2013 London Books edition of the 1930s novel that was made into a film starring Jimmy Hanley. In 2010, We Are Not Manslaughterers re-examined the case of the first police officer to be murdered in a civil riot on UK soil and revealed a cover-up.

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