Nicholas Christopher - Authors Bio

Nicholas Christopher was born and raised in New York City. In the past 25 years, he has published extensively as a novelist (Veronica, A Trip to the Stars, Franklin Flyer, and The Soloist), poet, and nonfiction writer. The author of five novels, eight volumes of poetry including two novellas-in-verse, and a critical book on film noir and the American city, Christopher also edited two major anthologies of American poetry. His new novel, THE BESTIARY, will be published July 3, 2007, by The Dial Press.

Taught to read when he was three, Christopher grew up loving books and sports. At the Horace Mann School in New York, a teacher (who had led an interesting life as a poet married to the daughter of a South American dictator) recognized and encouraged his talent in poetry. At Harvard College, Christopher first began publishing work in journals and quarterlies. Majoring in English Literature, he specialized in Romanticism and Renaissance mysticism, and was awarded the university’s foremost poetry prize after studying with the poets Robert Lowell and Anthony Hecht. He also pursued studies in Latin and Modern Greek and translated the poetry of several 20th-century Greek poets, including Nobel Prize winners George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis. Christopher began traveling as a teenager, through much of Europe and behind the Iron Curtain, and lived for an extended period in the Greek Islands after graduating from college. Travel, the classics, and mysticism are themes woven into his work through the years.

After living in Europe, Christopher returned to New York and published his first work in the New Yorker at the age of 25. A few years later, a two-page spread of five poems was featured in the magazine, leading to a contract with Alfred A. Knopf for his first book, On Tour with Rita. Christopher’s first novel, The Soloist, was published around the same time (it was reissued in paperback in December 2006).

To support his work early on, Christopher worked in an eclectic assortment of jobs—bricklayer, roofer, librarian, projectionist, film researcher, and a brief stint as a night club manager on the island of Rhodes. But after his first books were well received and widely reviewed, he was offered a teaching job at New York University. Today he is a professor at Columbia University, teaching two graduate courses a year.

Christopher and his wife, the writer Constance Christopher, have continued to travel widely in recent years: to the Greek islands, to Paris and Venice, and to two remote tropical islands, Kauai and Bequia (a ten-mile-square island that is in the Windward Island chain). In New York City, they live and work in an apartment with their three cats, Brahma, Stella, and Luna, a mother and two of her offspring, who were rescued from the city streets. Christopher frequents film noir festivals and continues to explore, on foot, the seemingly inexhaustible boroughs of New York. An ardent Yankee fan, he holds season tickets at Yankee Stadium, practices yoga, and in the spring and fall plays soccer in pickup games in Central Park.

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• The Authors Official Webpage
• The Bestiary @ Amazon.com
• Authors Bio
• Essay by the Author on the Origins of the book