London Review of Books bookshop window display, 2016. Photo by Howard Trent.
John Scanlan is a writer and researcher. His most recent book was Rock‘n’Roll Plays Itself: A Screen History (2022).
He is the co-founder and series editor of Reaktion’s ‘Reverb’ series of books, which has – since 2010 – commissioned some two dozen titles and whose recent successes include Seth Bovey’s acclaimed Five Years Ahead of My Time: Garage Rock from the 1950s to the Present (Shindig! magazine’s book of the year, 2019) and Mark Doyle’s widely-praised The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-Detached.
He has collaborated with the BAFTA- and Emmy-nominated film director/producer Alex Harvey on a number of projects, including ‘Road Music’ (currently in post-production), which is partly based on ideas explored in his 2015 book, Easy Riders, Rolling Stones.
His next book, on the subject of waste, will be published in 2025.