Timothy Egan

Timothy Egan is a third-generation Westerner and one of nine children. He was raised in Spokane, Washington. After seven years and a series of odd jobs, he graduated from the University of Washington. In the 1980s he wrote for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and then quit his reporting job to write his first novel. In 1997, he moved to Italy with his family and fell in love with its history and wine culture. The experience laid the foundation for his first novel, published in 2004, The Winemaker’s Daughter. For the past eighteen years, he has worked as a reporter for The New York Times. He began his career with the newspaper as its Pacific Northwest correspondent, and then he became a national enterprise reporter—a journalist who develops original stories for a publication. Currently, he writes a weekly column for The New York Times entitled “The Opinionator,” in which he writes about politics and current events from a progressive perspective. The column appears every Friday. In 2001, he and several other Times reporters won the Pulitzer Prize for the 15-part series, “How Race Is Lived in America,” published in 2000. Egan has covered stories specific to the American West, stories on the deterioration of rural America, and a report for which he retraced the path that Lewis and Clark followed during their western expedition. Egan has received honorary doctorates from Willamette University, Whitman College, Lewis and Clark College, and Western Washington University. He currently lives in Seattle with his wife, the journalist Joni Balter. They have two children.