| Mihir Bose | |
| Birth Date: | 12 January 1947 |
| Birth Place: | Calcutta, West Bengal |
| Occupation: | Journalist |
| Nationality: | British Indian |
| Alma Mater: | Loughborough University |
| Genre: | Non-fiction |
| Subject: | Sports |
Mihir Bose (born 12 January 1947[1]) is a British Indian journalist and author. He writes a weekly "Big Sports Interview" for the London Evening Standard, and also writes and broadcasts on sport and social and historical issues for several outlets including the BBC, the Financial Times and Sunday Times. He was the BBC Sports Editor until 4 August 2009.
He has written for most of the major UK newspapers and several business publications, presented programmes for radio and television, and written 26 books including a history of Bollywood and various books on football and cricket.
Bose is of Indian origin. Born in Calcutta, he grew up in Bombay, now Mumbai.[2] He went from India to the UK in 1969 to study engineering at Loughborough University. He took up accountancy and qualified as a chartered accountant in 1974.[3]
He started his journalistic career at LBC Radio, before writing for the Sunday Times. He gave up accountancy in 1978 to become a full-time journalist concentrating on business journalism but also writing about sport. He moved from business journalism to investigative sports reporting in the 1990s, editing the Inside Track column for the Sunday Times. He moved to the Daily Telegraph in 1995, where he started the paper's Inside Sports column.
He left the Telegraph to become the BBC's sports editor in October 2006.[4]
Bose has also presented on radio and television, including BBC Radio 4's Financial World Tonight, the South Asia Report on the BBC World Service and What the Papers Say for Channel 4.
His output as the BBC's head sports writer included a regular blog on the Corporation's website.
On 4 August 2009, Bose resigned from the BBC for personal reasons.[5] It was reported that Bose was unhappy with the forthcoming move of the BBC Sports Department from London to Manchester, which would have required him to relocate.[6] He was replaced as Sports Editor by David Bond.[7]
Bose now writes a blog for the football-related website insideworldfootball.biz.[8] He contributes a weekly "Big Interview" to the London Evening Standard.
He regularly broadcasts on radio and television in the UK and on overseas channels on sports, race, Indian politics and Commonwealth issues. He also blogs for PlayUp, a specialist sports outlet.
Bose has written 27 books and 15 collaborations on a range of subjects. His books include False Messiah: The Life and Times of Terry Venables (Andre Deutsch, 1997), A History of Indian Cricket (Andre Deutsch, 2002), Manchester Disunited (Aurum Press, 2007) and The Spirit of the Game (Constable, 2012). His History of Indian Cricket was the first book by an Indian writer to win the prestigious Cricket Society Literary Award in 1990. His study of sports and apartheid, Sporting Colours, was runner-up in the 1994 William Hill Sports Book of the Year award.[9]
Bose has also written a book in the form of a comprehensive history of India's film industry called Bollywood: A History.[10] Bose wrote The Aga Khans (published in 1984 by World's Work Ltd, The Windmill Press, Kingswood, Tadworth, Surrey), a work that unflatteringly detailed the lives of the first three Aga Khans. The 4th Aga Khan suppressed any further publication of the book by bringing legal action against Bose.[11]
Bose has won the following awards:[12]
Bose lives in west London with his wife, Caroline Cecil, who runs a financial PR consultancy. He has a daughter, Indira. He told Paddy O'Connell on Radio 4's Broadcasting House programme that he went to school with the Indian cricketer Sunil Manohar "Sunny" Gavaskar.[13]