[12][13] Among those who joined him on the team were novelists Alec Waugh,[12] John Moore and Thomas Armstrong,[14] as well as Test cricket legends Len Hutton, Douglas Jardine and Denis Compton.

[12] In 2012, 100 years after the original team last played, literary agent Charlie Campbell and novelist Nicholas Hogg announced they were starting the Authors XI anew.

This is a reference to a remark Australian cricketer Kim Hughes made dismissing England's Mike Brearley when they captained opposing Ashes teams in 1981: "He had nothing going for him except that he was intelligent.

"[15] Writers who joined the revived team included novelists Sebastian Faulks, Richard Beard, Mirza Waheed, and Alex Preston, historical non-fiction writers Tom Holland, James Holland, Matthew Parker and Peter Frankopan, memoirist William Fiennes, young adult novelists Anthony McGowan and Joe Craig, journalists Amol Rajan and Chris Hemmings, sportswriters Jonathan Wilson and Jon Hotten, science writer Adam Rutherford, poet Tim Beard, biographer Ben Falk and editor Matt Thacker.

[15][16] The Authors XI play against village cricket clubs in England, as well as against clubs such as the Lords and Commons (made up of members of Parliament),[17] the Actors XI (a team that includes Damian Lewis and Iain Glen),[6] the Royal Household (composed of staff of the British royal family)[13] and the Eton College team.

[15] In September 2019, they won a celebrity match against a Lord's Taverners team that included Andy Caddick, Matthew Hoggard and Gladstone Small,[18] all former Test and One-Day International (ODI) players for England.

[21][22] The team captains rode onto the cricket pitch atop camels and the next day, the Authors made the front page of the world's largest newspaper, The Times of India.

Sebastian Faulks wrote the foreword, in which he noted that "Amateur cricketers tend to be vain, anecdotal, passionate, knowledgeable, neurotic and given to fantasy.

"[15] Eighteen of the Authors XI's 2012-13 players (including historian Thomas Penn and editor Sam Carter) contributed chapters about a particular aspect of the game.

Among those with chapters: actor Dan Stevens wrote a chapter ("Edwardian Cricket and Downton Abbey") about filming a cricket game on that television series, Tom Holland wrote in "Youth and Age" about learning to love the game as a boy after at first finding it both tedious and humiliating (as well as about hitting the first six of his life while playing in a 2012 Authors game,[15] a feat he also recounted in a 2013 Financial Times article),[30] and William Fiennes penned a piece on "Cricket and Memory" that ended with him drifting away in a haze as he was stretchered off the field after snapping his collarbone while diving to make a catch.

[15] In Anthony McGowan's chapter, titled "Cricket and Class", he noted that he, Nicholas Hogg and Jon Hotten were the only players on the 2012–13 team to have attended state schools: "The Authors CC is crammed to the gills with the quite ludicrously posh… the team is packed with the full range of characters from a Fifties public school story – the hearty, sporty type; the etiolated intellectual; the endearingly modest earl; even an exiled Ruritanian princeling"[15] Reviewing the book for The Guardian, Peter Wilby called it "a distinguished addition to the game's extensive and eclectic literature".