b. 1967

Kevin Macdonald was born in Glasgow, Scotland, the grandson of the Hungarian-born English filmmaker Emeric Pressburger, and educated at Glenalmond College, followed by Oxford University. He began his career with a biography of his grandfather, The Life and Death of a Screenwriter (1994), which he turned into the documentary The Making of an Englishman (1995). His brother Andrew Macdonald is a film producer. After making a series of biographical documentaries, Macdonald directed One Day in September (2000), about the killing of Israeli atheletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary. His next major feature-length documentary was Touching the Void, which won the Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film at the 2004 BAFTA Awards - coincidently, it was Korda who had given Macdonald's grandfather his first job when he had arrived in England in 1935. Macdonald has also been associate editor at Faber & Faber since 1995: he co-edited The Faber Book of Documentary (1997), and wrote Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter (Faber, 1994, winner of BFI film book of the year and short-listed for the NCR non-fiction prize). His journalism has appeared in numerous nationals including the Guardian, Observer and Daily Telegraph. Kevin is married to production designer Tatiana Lund.