Brian Viner is an English journalist and author. Viner was born to an unmarried mother at the now demolished Royal Northern Hospital, London, and was adopted by a couple in Southport, Lancashire when a few weeks old. He met his birth parents for the first time in the 1990s. He was educated at King George V School, Southport, then at St Andrews University. In 1985/6 he was a Robert T Jones Memorial Scholar at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. From 1994 to 1999 Viner wrote for the Mail on Sunday. In 1997 he won a What the Papers Say Award for his work as the paper's television critic. He was a columnist on The Independent from January 1999 to December 2011, and then turned freelance, writing on a wide variety of topics for numerous national newspapers, including the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday, the Financial Times, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times, The Independent, The Guardian, the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Express. At The Independent, he was principally a sports writer, and "The Brian Viner Interview" with a well-known sporting figure was, until its termination after almost 13 years, the longest-running weekly interview in British newspaper journalism. 

October 25th, 1961 in (Age 62)