Journalist, Editor & Novelist · Edge, The Guardian · 1990s · British
Started at Edge in 1995, became The Guardian's first ever games editor, and then wrote a bestselling novel about a boy who communicates through Minecraft.
Keith Stuart began writing about games at Edge in 1995, during the magazine's most influential period, and went on to write for Official PlayStation Magazine UK as well as for publications with no connection to games at all — FHM, Esquire, FourFourTwo, and the art magazine Frieze. In the late 2000s he became The Guardian's first ever games editor, a genuinely significant appointment: it marked the point at which a serious British newspaper decided that games required not occasional coverage but a dedicated editorial position, on the same footing as film or music. His work has consistently pushed at the boundary between games writing and general cultural writing, and his books make the argument most directly. He has written two histories of Sega, and his debut novel, A Boy Made of Blocks — about a father reconnecting with his autistic son through Minecraft — became a major bestseller and a Richard & Judy Book Club pick. Subsequent novels including The Frequency of Us and Days of Wonder have been selected for BBC Two's Between the Covers and Radio 4's Book at Bedtime. He remains one of the few critics to have moved from games journalism into mainstream literary fiction while continuing to do both.