Simon Parkin
Simon Parkin is an English writer. He is a contributing writer for The New Yorker, a critic for The Observer, and the author of three non-fiction books. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the New Statesman, 1843, and he is a frequent contributor to The Long Read in The Guardian. He also hosts a podcast called My Perfect Console where guests talk about five video games that were meaningful to their life. Parkin has been the recipient of two awards from the Society of Professional Journalists. His book A Game of Birds and Wolves was shortlisted for the 2020 Mountbatten Award for Best Book. His book The Island of Extraordinary Captives was one of the New Yorker's Best Books of 2022, and winner of the 2023 Wingate Prize. Career Parkin began contributing to The New Yorker, where he often writes about technology, in 2013. In 2016 he became the first video game critic for The Observer, contributing to The New Review, the paper's critics' pages. Parkin has also written long-form journalism for Harpers, The New York Times and is a regular contributor to both The Guardian Weekend Magazine and the newspaper's long-form journalism section, The Long Read. His 2016 Harper's story "So Subtle a Catch", which investigates the widespread theft of carp from British lakes, was included in the 2017 edition of The Best American Nonrequired Reading. The New York Times has praised Parkin's "literary eye for scenic and investigative detail" and described his criticism on gaming and play as "thoughtful and serious." The Library Journal has described Parkin's journalism as "groundbreaking", claiming that "his reportage leads to brilliant, fresh insights." Parkin has been both a critic of and advocate for the video game medium. "Tabloids are forever blaming video games for their role in the latest school shooting," he said in a 2016 interview with Salon. "That kind of reporting is increasingly passé, simply because most readers under the age of 45 have grown up with video games in their entertainment diet so the pariah schtick doesn't work on them... That said, game industry leaders have often failed to deal with these scandals in a mature way. It's possible to acknowledge that you’re not part of a problem while simultaneously offering ideas for how you might be part of the solution." In a separate interview with The Guardian, Parkin argued that "the ability that video games have to allow us to inhabit another person or another position in life, or another race or gender, is hugely powerful, and something that we’ve only just started to explore." Parkin has been the recipient of two awards for "Excellence in Feature Writing" from the Society of Professional Journalists and was a finalist in the British Foreign Press Awards for his reporting on the thirtieth anniversary of the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster. Parkin's first non-fiction book, Death by Video Game is an investigation into a number of deaths at Internet cafes in Taiwan, where the deceased had spent extended periods of