Gary Andrew Younge , (born January 1969) is a British journalist, author, broadcaster and academic. He was editor-at-large for The Guardian newspaper, which he joined in 1993. In November 2019, it was announced that Younge had been appointed as professor of sociology at the University of Manchester and would be leaving his post at The Guardian, where he was a columnist for two decades, although he would continue to write for the newspaper. He also writes for the New Statesman. Younge is the author of the books No Place Like Home (2002), Stranger in a Strange Land (2006), Who Are We – And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? (2011), The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dream (2013) and Another Day in the Death of America (2016). Early years and education Younge grew up in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, where he was born. He is of Barbadian extraction. In 1984, aged 15, he briefly joined the Young Socialists, the youth section of the Workers Revolutionary Party, but left a year later after harassment from other party members, including allegedly being accused of working for MI5 and claims that he supported Fidel Castro only because of his ethnicity. At the age of 17, Younge went to teach English in a United Nations Eritrean refugee school in Sudan with the educational charity Project Trust. In the late 1980s, he attended Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, where he studied French and Russian, and was elected Vice President (Welfare) of the Student Association, a paid sabbatical post he held for a year. Career In his final year at university he was awarded a bursary from The Guardian to study journalism at City University, and after a short internship at Yorkshire Television he joined The Guardian in 1993, and has since reported from all over Europe, Africa, the US and the Caribbean. His book, No Place like Home, in which he retraced the route of the civil rights Freedom Riders, was published in 1999 and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His subsequent books are Stranger in a Strange Land: Encounters in the Disunited States (2006), Who Are We – And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? (2011), The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dream (2013), and most recently Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (2016), a "deeply affecting"