Martin Rowson

Martin Rowson is a cartoonist and novelist.

He was born in 1959 and studied English at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He is a self-taught artist and after graduation published his first series of cartoons, 'Scenes from the Lives of the Great Socialists' in the New Statesman, which later became a book, published in 1983. He went on to contribute regularly to Financial Weekly, Sunday Today, and Today, and has also contributed to The Guardian, Time Out, The Independent on Sunday, The Daily Mirror, The Observer, The Daily Express and The Times Educational Supplement.

He is the illustrator of several books, including books by John Sutherland and Will Self, and graphic adaptations of well-known texts such as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1996)and The Waste Land (1990). His style is deliberately offensive and provocative in the tradition of 18th-century satirists and cartoonists. In 2001 Ken Livingstone appointed him Cartoonist Laureate for London.

His novels include Snatches (2006), a comic historical journey through the human race; Stuff (2007), part autobiography and part family history; Fuck: The Human Odyssey (2008); and Giving Offence (2009).

He has also worked as an occasional book reviewer for the Sunday Correspondent, The Independent on Sunday and The Guardian and writes a column in The Tribune. In 2006 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Journalism from the University of Westminster.

Martin Rowson won the Cartoon Arts Trust Political Cartoonist of the Year Award in 2000 and 2006 and the Political Cartoon Society Cartoonist of the Year Award in 2010. He is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society, Chairman of the British Cartoonists' Assocation, Trustee of the London Cartoon Museum and the Powell-Cotton Natural History Museum and a trustee and former Vice President of the Zoological Society of London.