Laura Hillenbrand

The youngest of four children, Laura Hillenbrand grew up in a suburb north of Washington D.C.. As a child, she loved writing stories and riding horses on her father’s farm. While studying at Kenyon College, she developed an incurable illness called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that forced her to drop out of school and move back in with her family. In the late 1980s, Hillenbrand felt well enough to move to Chicago with her future husband. Still confined to her home, she began a writing career in sports journalism and, drawing from her love of horses, she wrote the 2001 best-selling nonfiction book Seabiscuit about the unlikely achievements of an undersized race horse. Almost a decade later still battling the illness, and largely house-bound, she finished work on Unbroken. Hillenbrand says that since her illness prevents her from leaving her house, she writes books about incredible physical feats so that she can live vicariously through the stories she tells. Hillenbrand currently lives in Washington D.C.