Author Bios

Daniel James Brown was born in 1951 and grew up in the western United States, developing the deep connection to the landscape and culture of the Pacific Northwest that pervades his writing. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his master’s degree from San Jose State University. He spent…

Laura Hillenbrand was born in 1967 in Fairfax, Virginia, and grew up in an academic family; her father was a professor, and she was surrounded by books and the expectation of intellectual achievement from her earliest years. She attended Kenyon College in Ohio, where she studied history and developed the skills in archival research and…

David Grann was born in 1967 in New York City and grew up in Connecticut and New York. He attended Connecticut College and later earned a master’s degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Before turning to journalism and narrative nonfiction, he worked briefly in political campaigns and policy. He…

Yuval Noah Harari was born in 1976 in Kiryat Ata, Israel, and grew up in Haifa. He completed his undergraduate studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before earning his doctorate from Jesus College, Oxford, in 2002, with a thesis on the memory and identity of early modern soldiers. He returned to Israel and joined…

Ta-Nehisi Coates was born on September 30, 1975, in Baltimore, Maryland, into a household shaped by the Black Power movement and a fierce intellectual commitment. His father, W. Paul Coates, was a Vietnam veteran, a former member of the Black Panther Party, and the founder of Black Classic Press, a publishing house dedicated to preserving…

Paul Kalanithi was born in 1977 in the Bronx, New York, to Indian immigrant parents, and grew up in Kingman, Arizona—a small desert town far from the literary and academic centers to which he would eventually make his way. His father was a cardiologist, and the world of medicine was present from his earliest years,…

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama was born on January 17, 1964, on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, into a working-class family shaped by determination, community, and aspiration. Her father, Fraser Robinson III, worked as a pump operator for the Chicago Water Department despite suffering from multiple sclerosis, and her mother, Marian Shields Robinson, was a…

Elie Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, a small town in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania (then part of Hungary). He was the third of four children in a deeply observant Jewish family; his father was a shopkeeper and a pillar of the local Jewish community, and from his earliest years Wiesel…

Trevor Noah was born on February 20, 1984, in Johannesburg, South Africa, to Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah, a Xhosa woman from a township outside Johannesburg, and Robert Noah, a Swiss man of German heritage. The circumstances of his birth were themselves a crime under apartheid law, which prohibited sexual relations between people of different races. His…

Jeannette Walls was born in 1960 in Phoenix, Arizona, the second of four children in a family that would come to define both the promise and the peril of American bohemian idealism. Her father, Rex Walls, was a charismatic, brilliantly intelligent, and deeply troubled man—a self-taught engineer, a visionary dreamer, and an alcoholic whose inability…