Andrew Gumbel is an award-winning journalist and author with a long track record as an investigative reporter, political columnist, magazine writer and foreign correspondent. He contributes regularly to The Guardian from Los Angeles, where he lives, and has written extensively on subjects ranging from politics, law enforcement and counterterrorism, to popular culture and food. His book Oklahoma City: What The Investigation Missed — And Why It Still Matters (HarperCollins) was published to wide acclaim in 2012. A thoroughly revised version of his history of electoral corruption in the United States, Down for the Count: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America, was published by The New Press in 2016.
In early 2020, he was involved in two new books, one, which he wrote, the remarkable story of a public university in Atlanta that has transformed the prospects of its lower-income students, Won’t Lose This Dream: How an Upstart Urban University Rewrote the Rules of a Broken System (The New Press, May 2020) and the other, on which he was a co-editor and contributor, about the prospects for American democracy in the age of Donald Trump, Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government for the People (also from The New Press, out March 2020).
Born in Britain, Andrew spent six years with the international news agency Reuters, then worked for The Guardian and its rival British daily, The Independent. He was in Berlin when the Wall came down, in Kuwait in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, in Bosnia and Serbia during the wars of the 1990s, and in Italy to watch the political rise of Silvio Berlusconi.
Since 1998 he has been based in the United States, breaking stories on subjects as diverse as the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, the manipulation of intelligence in the lead-up to the Iraq war, the cultural battles over gay marriage, mismanagement at Hollywood’s dedicated retirement facility for former television and film workers, and the growing security threat posed by mass shootings. Aside from The Guardian, his pieces have appeared in The Atlantic, the Daily Beast, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeleno, Vanity Fair, The Advocate and the Hollywood news website TheWrap.
Andrew won a Project Censored award in 2003 for his work on the shortcomings of America’s new-generation computer voting machines. Five years later, he was named best political columnist of 2008 by the Association of Alternative Newspapers for his long-running column American Babylon, which appeared in the now-defunct LA CityBeat.
In addition to his work as a writer, Andrew has also developed a strong reputation as a journalism teacher. He received a first class honors degree in modern languages (French and Italian) from Oxford University.
Photo by Robert Gallagher, reproduction under license only