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, 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, bought a recently published biography of JFK. Fascinated by the book's occasional references to Kennedy's interest in Churchill, he decided to research the subject. Joel discovered a trove of material in archives on both sides of the Atlantic, and spent the following five years researching and writing his account of Kennedy's obsession.

Kennedy's Only Hero is the result. It is his first book.