Susan Orlean is the author of nine books, including The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup; My Kind of Place; Saturday Night; and On Animals. In 1999, she published The Orchid Thief, a narrative about orchid poachers in Florida, which was made into the Academy Award-winning film “Adaptation” starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep. Her book, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend won the Ohioana Book Award and the Richard Wall Memorial Award.  In 2018, she published The Library Book, about the arson fire at the Los Angeles Public Library. It won the California Book Award and the Marfield Prize and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal. It is being adapted for television. Her 2025 memoir, Joyride, has been cited as one of the best books of the year by multiple sources including Kirkus and NPR.

Orlean has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1992, and has contributed to Vogue, Rolling Stone, Outside, and Esquire. She wrote for the second season of HBO’s How To With John Wilson and was nominated for an Emmy for the episode “How to Appreciate Wine”. She was a 2003 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Los Angeles.

Photo credit: Noah Fecks