Kevin Davey was born in Shelley, Suffolk, and now lives in Whitstable. He went to the University of Kent, Canterbury in 1976 to study Sociology and English, staying on to teach there and write an MPhil dissertation on the work of Raymond Williams. He worked in further education in London in the 1980s and 1990s and was chair of the Socialist Society (1986-88) and chair of the Socialist Conferences in Chesterfield (1987-88). He went on to work for Charter 88 and helped to create the online publishing network Open Democracy. Davey was a regular contributor to Tribune and New Statesman & Society in the 1980s and 1990s, and was editor of the radical monthly New Times from 1999 to 2000.His book English Imaginaries: Anglo-British Approaches to Modernity, an investigation into changing forms of Englishness in the twentieth century, was published by Lawrence and Wishart in 2000. Playing Possum (2017) is his first novel.