Martin Rowson

Writer, cartoonist and distinguished supporter of Humanism

..in the absence of any higher authorities, it behoves us to celebrate and protect all we've got left, which is ourselves as human.

Martin Rowson is a freelance cartoonist and writer whose work appears regularly in The Guardian, The Mirror, The Independent on Sunday, New Humanist, Tribune, Morning Star, Index on Censorship and The Spectator.

In 2001 he was appointed Cartoonist Laureate to the Mayor of London by Ken Livingstone in exchange for 1 pint of London Pride per annum, and reappointed by Boris Johnson in 2008 (currently 5 pints in arrears). He won the Cartoon Arts Trust Political Cartoonist of the Year Award in 2000 and 2005, and the Political Cartoon Society's Cartoon of the Year in 2004 and 2007. He also received the International Premio Satiri Award in 2006. He is a former vice-president of the Zoological Society of London, chairman of the British Cartoonists' Association, a trustee of the Cartoon Museum and the Powell-Cotton Museum in Thanet and an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.

His books include graphic novel adaptions of T S Eliot's The Waste Land and Lawrence Sterne's Tristam Shandy; Snatches, a novel; Stuff, a memoir of his late parents; The Dog Allusion: Gods, Pets and How to be Human, a counter-Dawkins plea for irrational atheism; Fuck: The Human Odyssey, a history of the world in 67 pictures, each containing one word in speech bubbles; and Giving Offence (something on which he is something of an expert). Buy his books at Amazon.co.uk through this link and a small commission will go to the BHA.

"I don't believe in God not because I can't, or because of the overwhelming scientific evidence (although that obviously helps) but because I don't want to. Religion is, in my mind, essentially politics with an added dimension latched on by its adherents, and therefore no more or less "true" than any other opinion. It should, in consequence, be treated in the same way as, say, the dicta of the Liberal Democrats. In practice, this boils down to my belief that anyone can believe whatever rubbish they want to, so long as, by and large, they leave me alone. And in the absence of any higher authorities, it behoves us to celebrate and protect all we've got left, which is ourselves as human."