Bestselling author, critic, and essayist is dazzling the literary world and academic institutions worldwide with a spellbinding new translation of Homer’s magnum opus.
Daniel Mendelsohn’s acclaimed books include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Newsday, Library Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, and Kirkus; The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, which won the National Books Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award in the U.S. and the Prix Médicis in France; a memoir, The Elusive Embrace (1999), a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; three collections of essays; a scholarly study of Greek tragedy, and a two-volume translation of the poetry of C. P. Cavafy. His tenth book, Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate, was a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and a Literary Hub Favorite Book of 2020, and was named Best Foreign Book of the Year in France.
Mendelsohn’s new translation of The Odyssey was just published on April 9, 2025.
Daniel Mendelsohn has also been a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure and a columnist for The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, and New York magazine, where he was the weekly book critic. He was named Editor-at-Large of the New York Review of Books in 2019 and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust that supports writers of nonfiction, essay, and criticism.
Daniel Mendelsohn’s honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Harry Vursell Prize for Prose Style, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Barnes and Noble Discover Prize, the NBCC Citation for Excellence in Book Reviewing, the George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism, and Princeton University’s James Madison Medal. In 2022, he was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Republic of France, and received the Premio Malaparte, Italy’s highest honor for foreign writers.
Mendelsohn received degrees in Classics from the University of Virginia and Princeton. He currently teaches literature at Bard College.
“Mendelsohn’s grounding in the Classics gives a larger reach to his essays beyond the news of the day.… To read a signature Mendelsohn essay is to be educated and entertained, and, always, freshly aware of how much more there is to read and know.” – NPR
“[Mendelsohn] is a brilliant storyteller, influenced by the Greek masters he so admires, eschewing the chronological, looping forward and back, teasing the reader with hints of what the gods may have in store.” —The Times of London
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