Daniel Mendelsohn
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Daniel Mendelsohn

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Daniel Mendelsohn is an internationally bestselling author, critic, essayist, and translator. Born in New York City in 1960, he received degrees in Classics from the University of Virginia and Princeton. After completing his Ph.D. he moved to New York City, where he began freelance writing full time; since 1991 he has been a prolific contributor of essays, reviews, and articles to many publications, most frequently The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. He has also been a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure and a columnist for The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, and New York magazine, where he was the weekly book critic. In February 2019, he was named Editor-at-Large of the New York Review of Books and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust that supports writers of nonfiction, essay, and criticism.

Mendelsohn’s books include "An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic" (2017), named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Newsday, Library Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, and Kirkus; "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million" (2006), 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" (1999), a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; three collections of essays; a scholarly study of Greek tragedy, "Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays" (2002), and a two-volume translation of the poetry of C. P. Cavafy (2009), which included the first English translation of the poet’s “Unfinished Poems.” His tenth book, "Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate" (2020) was a Kirkus and National Public Radio Best Book of the Year and was named Best Foreign Book of the Year in France. His new translation of Homer’s Odyssey was published in April, 2025 by the University of Chicago Press.

Daniel Mendelsohn’s honors include the Premio Malaparte, Italy's highest honor for foreign writers; the American Academy of Arts and Letters Vursell Prize for Prose Style, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Barnes and Noble Discover Prize, the NBCC Citation for Excellence in Book Reviewing, the George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism, and Princeton University’s James Madison Medal. In 2022 he was named a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Republic of France, and in 2025 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Association, he has sat on the Board of the American Council of Learned Societies. Mr. Mendelsohn lives in New York City and the Hudson Valley and teaches literature at Bard College.
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