About Andrew

Andrew Smith was born in Greenwich Village, New York, to English parents. A spell living in San Francisco was followed by relocation to the UK, where school classmates included the artist Dinos Chapman and future Spice Girls/American Idol svengali Simon Fuller—who managed Smith’s high school band but could do nothing to save them.

After studying philosophy and politics at the University of York he moved to London, where he worked as a van driver, in music stores and as a musician, recording and touring the UK and Europe with the Rough Trade group A Popular History of Signs (at one point auditioning for The Clash) before finally submitting to his first love, writing.

Starting at the music paper Melody Maker, he moved rapidly to Raygun, The Face, The Guardian, The (London) Sunday Times and The Observer as a longform feature writer, but in 2002 left journalism to write his UK #1 and international bestseller Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, which was nominated for two British Book Awards (including “Read of the Year”), chosen by The Times as one of its “100 Best Books of the Decade” and has been translated into over a dozen languages, most recently Chinese and Polish. His second work, Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall of Josh Harris and the Great Dotcom Swindle, about the eccentric web pioneer Josh Harris and the mysterious crash of Web 1.0, was published by Black Cat/Grove Atlantic in March, 2019, and is currently being developed into a Ben Stiller-directed TV series, starring Jonah Hill. His eagerly-awaited third book, Devil in the Stack, about his attempt to penetrate the microcosmos of computer code and understand what it's doing to us—and why—has been five years in the making and will appear on Grove Atlantic in August, 2024.

Smith appears often before live audiences and on radio and TV, and has written and presented a number of films and radio series, including the 60-minute BBC TV documentaries Being Neil Armstrong and To Kill a Mockingbird at 50, and the three-part BBC Radio 4 history of the lives of submariners, People of the Abyss.

The last decade has seen his focus shift more squarely to the digital revolution and its social implications, with high profile magazine and comment pieces appearing in The Economist’s 1843 magazine, The Financial Times and the US and UK editions of The Guardian. Smith also features in Stanford University's History of the Internet podcast series.

As relief from the machines, he is halfway into a novel, Deep South, whose plot wheels around a nexus of corruption in the wild South London enclave of Brixton during the early Thatcher years. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing in the UK and is these days based in Brooklyn, New York, while returning to his beloved South London often.