Matthew Lewis Engel (born 11 June 1951)[1] is a British writer, journalist and editor.
Engel was born in Northampton, son of solicitor Max David Engel (1912-2005) and Betty Ruth (née Lesser).[2][3] His grandfather had escaped anti-Semitic persecution in Poland.[4]
He was educated at Great Houghton Prep School, Carmel College, Oxfordshire, and Manchester University[5]
He began his career in 1972 as a staff journalist on The Guardian newspaper for nearly 25 years, reporting on a wide range of political and sporting events including a period as Washington correspondent beginning on 9/11. He later wrote columns in the Financial Times and now contributes to both these papers. Engel edited the 1993–2000 and 2004–2007 editions of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, with a short break when he worked in the US. He has been a strong critic of the International Cricket Council, international cricket's ruling body.
Engel was the Visiting Professor of Media at the University of Oxford for 2011.[6]
He was elected as a councillor for Herefordshire in October 2023 in a by-election for Golden Valley South ward.[7][8]
Engel lives on an old farm in Herefordshire. In 1990, he married former editorial director at Pan Books Hilary, daughter of Laurence Davies.[9] They had a son, Laurie, and adopted a daughter, Victoria (Vika), from Russia.[10][11] Laurie died of cancer in 2005, aged 13, and Engel set up a successful charity fund in his memory, the Laurie Engel Fund, which has raised more than £1.2m in partnership with the Teenage Cancer Trust to build a new unit for patients in Birmingham (opened 2010) and for a cancer centre scheduled for 2018. The proceeds of a book he wrote, Extracts from the Red Notebooks (Macmillan), are donated to this fund. His book, That’s The Way It Crumbles: The American Conquest of the English Language (Profile Books) was published in June 2017.