David Macey


David Macey was an English translator and intellectual historian of the French left. He translated around sixty books from French to English, and wrote biographical studies of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon.

Life

David Macey was born in Sunderland and grew up in Houghton-le-Spring. His father was a miner who had been sent down the pit aged fourteen, and his mother a woman whose family had been unable to afford for her to take up a grammar school place. He was educated at Durham Johnston Grammar School and went on to read French at University College London, where he wrote a PhD on Paul Nizan.
Interested in trying to link Marxism and psychoanalysis, Macey became a prolific contributor to Radical Philosophy. From 1974 he taught part-time at North London Polytechnic, UCL and City University London. In 1975 he was a founding member of the British Campaign for an Independent East Timor. After his partner Margaret Atack took a permanent post at Leeds University in 1981, Macey left academia to become a full-time writer and translator. Later, in 1995, he was appointed research associate in the French department of Leeds University; in 2010 he became special professor in translation at the University of Nottingham.
Macey married Margaret Atack in 1988, and they adopted three children.

Selected works

Translations