Joel Nelson is a British writer and historian. He took a first-class honours degree in History at Jesus College, Oxford, in 2016, and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge in 2017. He subsequently worked as an advisor to Rory Stewart MP, an editor at Foreign Affairs, and as Director of European Policy at an AI think-tank in Washington, D.C.

In 2020, Joel won a Kennedy Scholarship — and, knowing almost nothing about the man the scholarship was named for, read Fredrik Logevall's biography of JFK. Fascinated by the book's references to Kennedy's interest in Churchill, he decided to research the subject. He spent the next five years researching the subject in archives on both sides of the Atlantic.

Kennedy's Only Hero is his first book.