Jeff Connor
Jeff Connor lives in Edinburgh, and is currently rugby correspondent for the Mail on Sunday. He is the author of almost a dozen books, including a widely-acclaimed insight into the Tour de France - Wide-Eyed and Legless (Simon & Schuster) - and The Philosophy of Risk (Canongate), a biography of mountaineer Dougal Haston.
Books by Jeff Connor
Pointless
A season with Britain’s worst senior football side.
Finishing bottom of the Scottish Third Division two years in succession – and amassing just eight points in season 2003-2004 – how will the mighty East Stirlingshire fair this year? A unique insight into a truly unique football club, Pointless will make you laugh, cry and cringe in equal measure.
Short-listed for the National Sporting Club’s ‘Best Biography’
‘Bracing [and] comic…The supporting cast is direct from the latest Mike Leigh film’
The Times
‘An intriguing story…As the publisher’s blurb says (for once accurately), it’s “funny, sad and heartwarming””
Daily Telegraph
‘This is journalist Jeff Connor’s sympathetic but still painfully amusing account of another calamitous year in East Stirling’s long and inglorious history’
Daily Mail
Paperback publication: April 2006
Publication Date: August 2005
World Rights: Headline
The Lost Babes: Manchester United and the Legacy of Munich
The definitive story of the Busby Babes and the repercussions of the Munich Air Disaster.
February 6, 1958, the day that eight Manchester United players died on a German airfield, is a date etched forever in the annals of sporting tragedy. The Busby Babes were already enshrined in legend before the air crash, but Munich in many ways earned them immortality. They have never grown old. Jeff Connor examines the lives of – arguably - the greatest Manchester United side of all time.
‘Betting men should seize the obviously generous odds for a riveting new work to hold off all comers for the next 11 months and be proclaimed sports book of 2006 at Christmas … Jeff Connor’s spare and clinically crafted reporter’s skill masks his anger and enhances the harrowingly drawn-out aftermath of the tragedy - and the illustrious club’s shoddily neglectful part in it.’
Frank Keating, The Guardian
‘A thorough, and thoroughly moving, piece of work’
Daily Telegraph
Publication Date: February 2006
World Rights: HarperCollins
Field of Fire: A Summer of Suffering on the Tour de France
Originally published in 1988, Jeff Connor’s debut - Wide-Eyed and Legless (originally published by Simon and Schuster, and to be re-published by Mainstream in 2007) - remains a classic of cycling literature.
Describing the events of ANC/Halford’s drastic misadventure on the Tour de France in 1987, the book was acclaimed wherever it was reviewed.
In Field of Fire Jeff Connor will look back at the 1987 tour, reprise the key moments, and using the device of flashbacks to time, location and events, introduce the key characters from that summer - and bring the reader up to date with the fates of all involved: riders, mechanics and managers.
That tour remains a pivotal and life-changing moment for so many of the personnel involved. After 1987, things would never be the same again.
World Volume Rights: Mainstream
Once Were Lions: Rugby Lives In and Out of the Arena
The definitive account of life with the Lions.
The stories of over fifty Lions tourists, going back to the oldest living Lions from the 1946 tour; telling, in their own words, the human stories from each Test series, ending with the 2005 tour to New Zealand.
It will tell the story of the changing face of the sport in the words of the participants.
World Volume Rights: HarperSport