Kai Bird

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Kai Bird is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning author and columnist, best known for his biographies of political figures.

Bird was born in 1951 in Eugene, Oregon, but he spent his childhood in Jerusalem, Beirut, Dhahran, Cairo and Bombay. He finished high school in 1969 at Kodaikanal School in Tamil Nadu, India. He received his BA from Carleton College in 1973 and a M.S. in Journalism from Northwestern University in 1975. He was an associate editor of The Nation magazine from 1978-82 and then a Nation columnist. His biographical works include The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms (Touchstone, 1998), The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment (Random House, 1992) and Hiroshima's Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy (1998), which he co-edited with Lawrence Lifschultz. Bird and co-author Martin J. Sherwin won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in biography for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Knopf, 2005). He and Sherwin also won the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for their biography of Oppenheimer.

Bird is a recipient of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship (1973), an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship (1981), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1982), and a John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Grant for Research and Writing (1993-95). In 2001-2002 he was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Bird now lives in Kathmandu, Nepal with his wife and son. He is currently writing a memoir about the Middle East.