Daniel Mendelsohn is an award-winning memoirist, critic, and translator. Trained as a classicist at the University of Virginia and Princeton, he is a prolific contributor of essays, reviews, and articles to many publications, particularly The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. He has also been a columnist for the New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, and New York magazine, where he was the weekly book critic.
His books include the international bestseller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, which won the National Books Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award in the United States and the Prix Médicis in France, among many other honors; a memoir, The Elusive Embrace, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; two collections of essays, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken and Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays From the Classics to Pop Culture; and a two-volume translation of the poetry of C. P. Cavafy, which included the first English translation of the poet’s “Unfinished Poems.”
Daniel Mendelsohn’s honors include the PEN Harry Vursell Prize for Prose Style, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Barnes and Noble Discover Prize, the NBCC Citation for Excellence in Book Reviewing, and the George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism. A member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Association, he teaches literature at Bard College.