chris Hunt author & editor

Chris Hunt writes about football and music.Now retired, he continues to write books for pleasure.   His memoir Doing It For The Kids  saw him in the world of grassroots football, while World Cup Stories accompanied a BBC TV series. He was editor of numerous special editions of Mojo, Q, NME and Uncut, including five about The Beatles. After launching rap magazine Hip-Hop Connection he turned Match into the biggest selling football magazine in the UK. His encyclopedia, The Complete Book of Football, was published in the UK, Australia, the USA and in five foreign language editions. 

As a writer, Chris Hunt has covered four World Cups and interviewed two England managers. He once wrote a column for Your Cat magazine called My Life With Stalin – an everyday tale of one bloke and his cat. He has interviewed legends of every kind, from footballers Gordon Banks, Jairzinho and Eusebio, to rock stars Roger Daltrey, Lemmy and Kiss, and to rappers Public Enemy, De La Soul and Run DMC. He once interviewed Queen Latifah at the top of the Empire State Building, proving he'll always go that extra mile for a good story.

1996 Emap Awards: Editor Of The Year for Match – winner

1995 Emap Awards: Most Improved Magazine for Match – winner

1997 Emap Awards: Launch Of The Year for Sported – winner

1996 PPA Awards Editor Of The Year – highly commended

1981 Cambridge Footlights Young Writer Of The Year winner

Escape From Holland is a new book by Chris Hunt.

Just before dawn on May 10, 1940, German parachute troops rain down on Holland. Watching from his home on the Dutch coast is footballer Billy Marsden. It’s ten years to the day since the Germans saved his life in a Berlin hospital after he broke his neck playing for England but now it’s the German invasion of Holland that’s putting his life in jeopardy. 

In The Hague, Margot Fonteyn and the Sadler’s Wells Ballet watch the dogfights from the roof of their hotel. In Amsterdam, journalist David Woodward and his American wife, NBC war correspondent Margaret Rupli, are trying to file the story of the invasion, while young British diplomat Peers Carter is attempting to organise an evacuation just eight months into the job. 

Set across one weekend in May 1940, this is the true story of how all these people came together, along with a dozen more British football coaches and three million pounds worth of diamonds, to escape on the last boat out of Holland before the Dutch capitulated.

"The dash for the last British boat out of Holland in May 1940, a true story of football, ballet, journalism and war"