Mark Fisher

Mark Fisher was an English cultural critic, theorist, blogger and teacher. Born in 1968, he completed his PhD at the University of Warwick, where, during THE mid-90s, he was also a founding member of the interdisciplinary collective known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU). In 2003, he began his blog k-punk; several of the ideas articulated here about contemporary politics and culture would later be refined in his influential book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zer0, 2009). Together with the novelist Tariq Goddard, he founded the radical publishing imprint Zer0 Books; after leaving this imprint in 2014, the two founded Repeater Books.

Fisher was a frequent contributor to The Wire, Fact, Sight & Sound and other publications, and, during his lifetime, his writing on music, film, television and politics was collected in the books Ghosts Of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Zer0, 2014) and The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater Books, 2017). With Kodwo Eshun and Gavin Butt, he co-edited the anthology Post-Punk Then and Now (Repeater, 2016). He was also a visiting fellow and lecturer at Goldsmiths College, London, in the Department of Visual Cultures.

Mark Fisher died in 2017, survived by his wife and young son. Other of his blog writing, interviews and articles were posthumously collected in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016), published by Repeater in 2019. Subsequent to his death, Goldsmiths College established the annual Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture. The inaugural lecture in 2018 was delivered by Kodwo Eshun, in 2019 by Jodi Dean, and in 2020 by Simon Reynolds.