James Riordan (writer-sportsman)

James Riordan (10 October 1936 – 11 February 2012) was an English novelist, broadcaster, sports historian, and Russian scholar.

James Riordan
Born	(1936-10-10)10 October 1936 Portsmouth, England
Died	11 February 2012(2012-02-11) (aged 75) Portsmouth, England
Education	University of Birmingham
Occupations	Novelist broadcaster sports historian Russian scholar
Height	6 ft 5 in (1.96 m)

He was well known for his work Sport in Soviet Society, the first academic look at sport in the Soviet Union, and for his children's novels.

He claims to have been the first Briton to play football in the USSR, playing for FC Spartak Moscow in 1963. There are, however, no documents, match reports or eyewitness accounts that support his claim, and many details in the story were inaccurate.

Life and career

Born in Portsmouth in 1936, James Riordan learned to speak Russian during National Service training in the Royal Air Force from 1955 to 1957. In 1960, he graduated in Russian Studies at the University of Birmingham, before qualifying as a teacher at the London Institute of Education.

In 1963, Riordan studied at the Communist higher party school in Moscow; he was an avowed Communist and was one of the few English students at the school.

His autobiography Comrade Jim: The Spy Who Played for Spartak includes an account of his games for Spartak Moscow; some Russian commentators have questioned these claims.

When he returned to England, he became lecturer at Bradford University before moving on to the University of Surrey at Guildford where became head of the Russian Department and was awarded a personal professorship. In 1980, he was the Olympic attache for the British Olympic Association of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. He held an honorary doctorate of Grenoble University and was President (2003-5) and later Fellow of the European Committee for Sports History.

His autobiography, Comrade Jim: The Spy who Played for Spartak, was published in 2008.

His 2008 novel The Sniper tells the story of Soviet sniper Tania Chernova and is based on Riordan's interviews with the subject.

He has also made a study of "The Death Match" — the 1943 non-official association football match between Soviet POWs and soldiers of the Wehrmacht — and has written a scholarly article and a children's novel, Match of Death, on the subject.

Select bibliography

Autobiography

• Comrade Jim: The Spy Who Played for Spartak, Harper Perennial, 2009. ISBN 0007251157

Non-fiction

• Sport in Soviet Society: Development of Sport and Physical Education in Russia and the USSR. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977. (partially Birmingham, Univ., Diss.). ISBN 0-521-21284-7.
• Sport in European Cultures (2002)

Children's novels

• Sweet Clarinet (1998)
• When the Guns Fall Silent (2000)
• The Secret Telegram (2001)
• The Prisoner (2001)
• War Song (2001)
• Match of Death (2003)
• The Gift (2004)
• Escape from War (2005)
• Rebel Cargo (2007)
• The Sniper (2008)
• Blood Runner (2011)

Children's anthologies

• Mistress of the Copper Mountain: Folk Tales from the Urals (1974) ISBN 9780584623918
• Tales from Central Russia: Russian Tales (Kestrel, 1976) ISBN 0722651309, Illustrated by Krystyna Turska.
• Tales from Tartary: Russian Takes Volume Two (Kestrel, 1978) ISBN 0670691569, Illustrated by Anthony Colbert.
• Tales of King Arthur (Hamlyn, 1982) ISBN 0600353524, Illustrated by Victor Ambrus.
• The Woman in the Moon and Other Tales of Forgotten Heroines (Hutchinson,1985) ISBN 0-8037-0194-2, Illustrated by Angela Barrett.
• Russian Gypsy Tales (1985) ISBN 9780862410827
• An Illustrated Treasury of Fairy and Folk Tales (1986) ISBN 9780600310778
• The Wild Swans (Hutchinson,1987) ISBN 9780091725495, Illustrated by Helen Stratton.
• Folk-tales of the British Isles (1987) ISBN 5050010055
• The Sun Maiden and the Crescent Moon: Siberian Folk Tales (1989)
• The Barefoot Book of Stories from the Sea (Barefoot Books Ltd., 1996) ISBN 1-898000-09-3, Illustrated by Amanda Hall.
• The Twelve Labours of Hercules (Frances Lincoln,1998) Illustrated by Christina Balit.
• The Storytelling Star: Tales of the Sun, the Moon and the Stars (Pavilion Books Limited, 1999) ISBN 1-86205-202-6, Illustrated by Amanda Hall.
• The Young Oxford Book of Football Stories (2000)
• Russian Folk-Tales (Oxford University Press, 2000). ISBN 0 19 274536 0, illustrated by Andrew Breakspear.

As editor

• Kon, Igor; Riordan, James, eds. (1993). Sex and Russian Society. Indiana University Press. ISBN 9780253332011.
• James Riordan (ed.). Sport under Communism. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1978. ISBN 0-7735-0505-9.
• Riordan, James & Arnd Krüger (eds.). The international politics of sport in the twentieth century. London: Routledge, 1999. ISBN 0-419-21160-8
• James Riordan & Arnd Krüger (eds.). European cultures of sport: examining the nations and regions. Bristol: Intellect, 2003. ISBN 1-8415-0014-3
• Arnd Krüger & James Riordan (eds). The story of worker sport. Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics (1996). ISBN 0-87322-874-X

As translator

• Chinghiz Aitmatov, Jamilia, Telgram Books: London, 2012
• Anton Chekhov, Boys (short story), Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1979

Literary awards

Riordan's first novel Sweet Clarinet won the NASEN Award, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Children's Book Award. Match of Death won the South Lanarkshire Book Award. The Gift was also shorted for the NASEN Award.

External links

• Official biography at University of Worcester
• Biography at publisher Oxford University Press
• Interview by Soccerphile
• European Committee for Sports History
• James Riordan at Library of Congress, with 69 library catalogue records