Andrew Solomon

Andrew Solomon is an American writer, lecturer, and professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University Medical Center. He is also a longtime activist on issues including LGBTQ+ rights, mental health, and the arts. Solomon's earlier book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (2001) won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and it remains a landmark work in the literature of mental illness. Far From the Tree (2012) won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was adapted into a documentary film of the same name in 2017. His other books include The Irony Tower, a study of Soviet artists during the era of Glasnost, and Far and Away, a collection of his journalism on places undergoing political and cultural transformation. Solomon writes regularly for The New Yorker and The New York Times, and he is widely regarded as one of the most ambitious and humane practitioners of long-form nonfiction working today. His personal experience as a gay man whose own coming-out shaped his family's understanding of horizontal identity informs the perspective he brings to Far From the Tree, lending the book its distinctive blend of research, interview, and lived testimony.