James Shapiro is the Larry Miller Professor of English at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1985. Among his books are: 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005) which won the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction (as well as the ‘best of the best’ of all Baillie Gifford prize winners, in 2023); 1606: The Year of Lear (2015), winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography; Shakespeare in a Divided America (2020), selected one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times; and most recently, The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War (2024). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books. He has been awarded Guggenheim, Cullman, NEH, and American Academy in Berlin fellowships, and in 2011 was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Authors Guild, and is currently Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at the Public Theater in New York.

Photo credit – Mary Cregan