David Macey (5 October 1949 – 7 October 2011) 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
 Jacques Lacan by Anika Lemaire, 1979.
 Réponses: the autobiography of Françoise Sagan, 1979.
 The little mermaids: a novel by Yves Dangerfield, 1979.
 Teachers, writers, celebrities: the intellectuals of modern France by Régis Debray, 1981.
 Matisse: paper cutouts, [text by] Jean Guichard-Meili, 1983.
 The sculpture of Henri Matisse by Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, 1984.
 Colette: a passion for life by Geneviève Dormann, 1985.
 From Taylorism to Fordism: a rational madness by Bernard Doray, 1988.
 Democracy and political theory by Claude Lefort, 1988.
 (tr. and ed.) New essays on narcissism by Béla Grunberger, 1989.
 New foundations for psychoanalysis by Jean Laplanche, 1989.
 The Soviet military system by Jacques Sapir, 1990
 Critique of Modernity by Alain Touraine, 1995.
 Automatic discourse analysis by Michel Pêcheux, ed. Tony Hak and Niels Helsloot, 1995.
 The object of literature by Pierre Macherey, 1995
 (tr. and ed.) Lacan: a critical reader by Jacques Lacan, 1995.
 What is democracy? by Alain Touraine, 1997.
 Can we live together? Equality and difference by Alain Touraine, 2000.
 Society must be defended: lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 by Michel Foucault, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, New York: Picador, 2003
 Suicide bombers: Allah's new martyrs by Farhad Khosrokhavar, 2005
 The suffering of the immigrant by Abdelmalek Sayad, with a preface by Pierre Bourdieu, 2007.
 Psychoanalysis: its image and its public by Serge Moscovici, ed. with an introduction by Gerard Duveen, 2008.
 Suicide: the hidden side of modernity by Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet, 2008. 
 The Single Woman and the Fairy-Tale Prince by Jean-Claude Kauffmann, 2008.
 Resilience by Boris Cyrulnik, 2009.
 Violence by Michel Wieviorka, 2009.
 (tr. with Steve Corcoran) The communist hypothesis, 2010
 The meaning of cooking by Jean-Claude Kaufmann, 2010.
 The curious history of love by Jean-Claude Kaufmann, 2011
 Love online by Jean-Claude Kaufmann, 2012
 Emile Durkheim: a biography by Marcel Fournier, 2013

Other works
 Lacan in Contexts, London: Verso, 1988.
 The Lives of Michel Foucault, London: Hutchinson, 1993; NY: Pantheon, 1993.
 Introduction to The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis by Jacques Lacan, tr. Alan Sheridan, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994.
 Frantz Fanon: A Life, London: Granta, 2000.
 The Penguin dictionary of critical theory, London: Penguin, 2000.

References

External links
 Interview with David Macey on Fanon, Foucault and Race

1949 births
2011 deaths
French–English translators
English translators
French historians of philosophy
Translators of Jacques Lacan
English biographers