Marina Hyde Audiobooks

A Guardian columnist since 2000 replays the recent past in What Just Happened?!

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Who is Marina Hyde?

Marina Hyde, born in 1974, is an English journalist who has written a column for The Guardian since 2000. In the mayfly world of newspaper opinion, a tenure of more than two decades is remarkable in itself – columnists last that long at a national paper only by being reliably worth the reader’s time, week after week, through every kind of news cycle.

The facts of the CV are brief, then, but they carry weight: one paper, one byline, a quarter of a century of turning the week’s events into sentences people actually want to read. Fixtures like that are rarer in British journalism than the trade would care to admit.

Marina Hyde in audiobooks

What Just Happened?! is the Hyde in our catalogue, and the title is the mission statement: the recent past revisited with a columnist’s eye and a permanently raised eyebrow. Column writing is a spoken form at heart – rhythm, timing, the well-placed pause before the kill – and it translates to audio better than almost any other kind of journalism. For UK listeners this is the national conversation replayed by someone who was clearly taking notes throughout, and it works as satire and as record at once. Best consumed in instalments, as column-honed writing always is; the laughs keep their edge that way.