Michael Bywater

Michael Bywater
Born	(1953-05-11) May 11, 1953 London, England
Occupation	Writer
Children	1

Michael Bywater (born May 11, 1953) is an English nonfiction writer, columnist, critic, and essayist. He has been a columnist for newspapers and periodicals, like The Times, The Independent, and Observer. He has written several books, including Lost Worlds, Big Babies, and The Chronicles of Bargepole.

Biography

Bywater received his education at the independent Nottingham High School and later pursued studies at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He was a long-running columnist for The Independent on Sunday and an early futurist for The Observer. Bywater spent ten years on the staff of Punch, where he wrote a regular computer column and the anonymous "Bargepole" column. Additionally, he wrote regularly for The Times and had been a contributing editor to Cosmopolitan and Woman's Journal. He also writes regularly on high-tech subjects for The Daily Telegraph and technology magazines. He is a cultural critic for the New Statesman. In 1998, he was part of BBC Radio 4's five-part political satire programme Cartoons, Lampoons, and Buffoons. He also supervised the tragedy paper for several Cambridge colleges and, in 2006, was the writer-in-residence at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Bywater suggested that Bywater inspired Douglas Adams's character Dirk Gently.

Bywater was previously identified as a young fogey. In The Young Fogey Handbook, author Suzanne Lowry writes: "Michael Bywater, 30-year-old Punch columnist and former trendy who once worked in films, made bold to criticise Burberrys for the inferior quality of their product - the trench coats are not what they were in the days of the trenches. Burberrys responded that they could indeed live up to their past and made Bywater a coat based on the 1915 design devised by Kitchener and Burberry... complete with camel hair lining to protect a gentleman officer's flesh on the field..."

Games, books, music

In the mid-1980s, Bywater co-designed and co-wrote several interactive fiction games. He collaborated with Douglas Adams on Bureaucracy and the never-completed Milliways: The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe for Infocom. He also collaborated with Anita Sinclair on Jinxter for Magnetic Scrolls. In the late 1990s, he contributed to the writing team for Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic.

Bywater's book Lost Worlds, written on the human tendency for nostalgia, was released in 2004. His subsequent book, Big Babies, on the infantilisation of Western culture, was published in November 2006.

Bywater played church organ with Gary Brooker for the "Within Our House" charity concert.

External links

• Essay taken from Bywater's book, "Big Babies"