Austin's bio

Born in London in 1980, Austin went to state-funded schools in the British countryside, then King’s College, Cambridge University. He has worked as parliamentary researcher in the British House of Lords (for Baroness Shirley Williams, Leader of the Liberal Democrats), and in the former Soviet Union, Colombia, France and China for organisations including International Alert, Groupe URD and the British Council. He is at his happiest travelling (to 62 countries and quasi-states so far), playing percussion (since age 8), or snowboarding (most unusually in Iran). He's written previously on peacebuilding in Kosovo, Transdniestria and Abkhazia, post-conflict economics, and sales of Iraqi public assets by the US and UK. When this book gets published, he's a PhD candidate at MIT, and gets particularly excited by the spatial structures of cities, regional economies and social fragility.