Peter Mason (journalist and author)

Peter Mason (born 1963) is an English journalist and author.

His books include biographies of two great West Indies cricketers-turned-statesmen, Learie Constantine and Clyde Walcott, Bacchanal! (a study of Trinidad Carnival) and The Brown Dog Affair, about the "brown dog riots" of Edwardian London, which was made into a BBC Radio 4 play, The Strange Affair of the Brown Dog.^[1]

Among his other works are Jamaica in Focus, a study of the culture, politics and economics of Jamaica, and a history of Southend United football club.

As a journalist, Mason's longest running association has been with The Guardian,^[2] for whom he has been a staffer on the foreign and sports desks and for whom he is a regular obituarist. He is also an arts critic for the Morning Star newspaper.^[3]

In the late 1980s, Mason was among a small coterie of British journalists focusing on writing about green issues, in particular on the role of business in fostering environmental and social change. In the early 1990s, he was news editor of Green magazine, the UK’s first publication for green consumers, and in 1999, with its former editor Alistair Townley,^[4] he co-founded Ethical Performance, an international publication on corporate social responsibility. He was its editor and managing editor for 12 years.

With Football Factory author John King, Mason was also co-founder of Two Sevens^[5] small press magazine, which included one of the first ever interviews with Irvine Welsh.

Mason has written extensively on the Caribbean as well as on reggae and calypso. For a number of years he was a contributor to the weekly Black Echoes music newspaper (now known as Echoes).

In 2024, Mason abridged, edited and wrote an introduction to Charles Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), excising most of the scientific content to recreate the book purely as a piece of travel literature.