Andrew Solomon

Andrew Solomon is an American writer, psychologist, and activist whose work has placed him among the most influential public voices on mental health, family, identity, and the politics of difference. Born in New York City in 1963 and educated at Yale University, Jesus College, Cambridge, where he received first-class honors in English literature, and later at the University of Cambridge where he completed a Ph.D. in psychology, he has spent his career moving fluidly between literary journalism, academic research, and advocacy. His first major nonfiction book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, was published in 2001, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and has been translated into more than thirty languages; it remains widely regarded as one of the foundational contemporary accounts of clinical depression. Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, published in 2012 after more than a decade of reporting and over three hundred family interviews, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Wellcome Book Prize, the Books for a Better Life Award, the Median Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and a Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among other honors, and was named one of the New York Times Book Review's ten best books of the year. He is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a former regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, where he has reported extensively on topics including Soviet artists, Afghan cultural life, Libyan politics, and questions of identity and mental health. He is Professor of Clinical Psychology in Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, a lecturer at Yale, the president of PEN American Center, and a board member of numerous organizations devoted to LGBTQ rights, mental health advocacy, and the arts. He lives in New York and London with his husband, the writer John Habich Solomon, and their children.