Contributors

Photographer SIMON EMMETT’s long list of subjects for Esquire covers includes Idris Elba, Tony Blair and Michael Caine. This issue, he trains his cameras on Josh O’Connor, star of Netflix’s The Crown, for the magazine’s first photo shoot since lockdown. As well as being one of Britain’s leading portrait photographers, Emmett is an acclaimed film-maker. He is currently finishing a documentary about the rock band, The Darkness.

ANDREW O’HAGAN is among the UK’s leading writers of literary fiction and journalism. An Esquire editor-at-large, his work also appears in The London Review of Books and The New York Times. His new novel, Mayflies, excerpted in this issue, is published by Faber on 3 September.

Award-winning writer MARK O’CONNELL’s first piece for Esquire is a column for our Journal section about a revelatory experience in a museum in Kiev. A contributor to The Guardian and The New York Times, O’Connell’s most recent book, Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back, was published by Granta in April. Sally Rooney called it “extraordinarily good”.

Displaced Welshman JOE DUNTHORNE, another contributor to Journal, writes about his unfixed national identity. Dunthorne’s 2008 novel Submarine was made into a film by Richard Ayoade. Last year, Faber published his second collection of poetry, O Positive.

New Jersey-based designer and illustrator JOHN GALL is known for his striking book jacket designs for Haruki Murakami, Michel Houellebecq and Jennifer Egan, among many others. His distinctive cut-and-paste collages have been collected in a book, John Gall Collages 2008– 2018, published by Abrams. For Esquire, we asked him to take his scissors and his glue to the autumn/winter menswear collections. Gall is creative director of the publisher Alfred A Knopf.

Novelist and journalist WILL SELF is one of the best known and most admired literary figures in the country. An Esquire editor-at-large since 2011, this issue he declares his lust for Elon Musk, who might be interested to know that his future paramour last year published a memoir, Will, described by The Observer as “darkly angelic”.

Based in London, visual artist MANSHEN LO is a freelance illustrator, and a director of short films and commercials. Her illustrious client list includes Pentagram, The New Yorker, MTV and The Atlantic. For this issue of Esquire, she brings to life deputy style editor Finlay Renwick’s story about the grooming industry’s designs on our homes.