Nicholas Dawidoff (born November 30, 1962) is an American writer. Dawidoff was born in New York City, and grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, with his mother and sister. His father's struggles with mental illness left him without a prominent male figure from an early age – a painful subject he explores in an article for The New Yorker called My Father’s Troubles.

Education and career

He graduated from the Hopkins School and attended Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude in 1985 with a degree in history and literature. He moved to New York to pursue a career as a writer and began working at Sports Illustrated, where he became a staff writer covering baseball and the environment. In 1989, he was selected as a Henry Luce Scholar and spent a year in Bangkok, Thailand, writing for the Bangkok Post and teaching American Studies at Chulalongkorn University. In 1991, he left Sports Illustrated and began writing books. He is the author of six books and writes articles on a variety of topics, for periodicals like The New Yorker, the Ideas Section of The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine.

Recognitions

Dawidoff has also been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Civitella Ranieri Fellow, a Berlin Prize Fellow of the American Academy, as well as an Art for Justice Fellow. He was the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. He has also taught at Sarah Lawrence. He is a member of the honorary council board of directors of MacDowell, a member of the advisory board for the Wesleyan Center For Prison Education, a literary ambassador for Freedom Reads and a member of the board of directors at Hopkins School.

Published books