Andrew Solomon (born October 30, 1963) is a New York-born bisexual writer on politics, culture, and psychiatry who lives in New York and London. He has written for publications such as the New York Times, The New Yorker, and Artforum, on topics including depression, Soviet artists, the cultural rebirth of Afghanistan, Libyan politics, and deaf politics. He is also a contributing writer for Travel and Leisure. In 2008, he was awarded the Humanitarian Award of the Society of Biological Psychiatry for his contributions to the field of mental health. He has a staff appointment as a lecturer in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University
His most recent book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, won the 2001 National Book Award;[1] it was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize,[2] and has been published in 24 languages.
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Solomon attended the private preparatory school Horace Mann, graduating cum laude. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Yale University in 1985, graduating magna cum laude. He studied English at Jesus College, Cambridge, earning the top first-class degree in English in his year, and an MA. As of 2009, he is pursuing a PhD at Jesus College, Cambridge in psychology, working on attachment theory under the supervision of Prof. Juliet Mitchell.
Born and raised in the United States, as an adult Solomon became a dual citizen of the United States and United Kingdom. Solomon had an official civil partnership ceremony to journalist and editor John Habich on June 30, 2007, at Althorp, the childhood home of Diana, Princess of Wales; the New York Times featured the wedding in their "Vows" column, The New York Times, July 8, 2007, and Tatler ran a six-page feature. The Daily Beast included it on their list of the ten most worthy gay weddings. The wedding ceremony that Solomon and Habich wrote for that occasion has been taught as a sample text at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in a course on privacy and civil rights law.
Solomon and Habich married again on July 19, 2009, the eighth anniversary of their meeting, in Connecticut, so that they would have a marriage that was legally recognized in the state of New York.
In November 2008, Solomon fathered a daughter, Carolyn Blaine Smith Solomon, with a female Yale classmate, Blaine Smith, who lives in Fort Worth, Texas. He fathered a son, George Charles Habich Solomon, in April 2009, who lives with Solomon and Habich, his adoptive father, in New York.
Solomon's father, Howard Solomon, is chairman of Forest Laboratories, a company noted for its production of anti-depressants, a field the company entered after Howard Solomon saw how effective anti-depressant treatment was for his son. The story of their relationship was a cover article in Business Week on May 27, 2002. Another story appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek in July 2011.
Andrew Solomon's brother, David Solomon, is a senior executive at Forest Laboratories.
Solomon's mother chose euthanasia at the end of a long battle with cancer, and Solomon has written of the experience of being present at her planned suicide, in an article about euthanasia for the New Yorker, and in a fictionalized account in his novel, A Stone Boat; and again in his book The Noonday Demon.
In 1988, Solomon began his study of Russian artists, which culminated with the publication of The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost (Knopf, 1991).
Solomon was asked in 1993 to consult with members of the National Security Council on Russian affairs and some of his words were used in President Bill Clinton's first Russia speeches.
Solomon was a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine from 1993-2001.
His first novel, A Stone Boat (Faber, 1994), tells the story of a man's shifting identity as he watches his mother battle cancer. It was a runner up for the LA Times First Fiction prize and was a national bestseller; it has now been published in 5 languages and is being developed as a film.
Solomon's most recent book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (Scribner, 2001), has won him fourteen national awards, including the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist status. It has been on the New York Times bestseller list in both hardback and paperback, and has also been a bestseller in seven foreign countries. Mr Solomon has lectured on depression around the world, including stints at Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Cambridge, and the Library of Congress.
Andrew Solomon's writing on cystic fibrosis has won him the Angel of Awareness Award of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, as well as the Clarion Award for Journalism. In April 2009, he won the Bert I Green Award of the International Association of Culinary Professionals for his profile of Grant Achatz in Food and Wine magazine. He has written essays for many recent anthologies and books of criticism, including an essay for My Father Married Your Mother: Writers Talk About Stepfamilies (ed. Anne Burt) pub. by Norton, one for Coach (ed. Andrew Blauner), pub. by Warner Books, 2005, one for Who Owns the Past: Cultural Policy, Cultural Property, and the Law (ed. Kate Fitz Gibbon), pub. by Rutgers University Press, 2005, one for The Proust Project (ed. Andre Aciman), pub. by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004, one for Loss Within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS (ed. Edmund White), pub. by University of Wisconsin Press, 2001, and one for Our Mother's Spirit's (ed. Bob Blauner), pub. by HarperCollins, 1998. His writing was also selected for Best American Travel Writing 2007 (ed. Susan Orlean), pub. Mariner Books, 2007 and Best American Travel Writing 2003 (ed. Ian Frazier), pub. Houghton Mifflin, 2003 . He has written critical afterwares to the reissues of Corrigan by Caroline Blackwood, pub. NY Review of Books Press, 2002, and to Bertram Cope's Year by Henry Blake fuller, pub. by Turtle Point Press, 1999.
He is writing a book, to be published in 2010, called A Dozen Kinds of Love: Raising Remarkable Children, which deals with how families accommodate children with physical, mental and social disabilities.
Solomon is an activist and philanthropist in three areas: LGBT rights, mental health, and the arts. For LGBT rights, He serves on the boards of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and Trans Youth Family Allies. He established the Solomon Fellowships at Yale University for students who wish to do research in LGBT studies; they are awarded on a competitive basis every spring. he has written on gay marriage for The Advocate and for Anderson Cooper's blog [1], and he wrote the gay issues piece for Newsweek's Obama inaugural issue.
In mental health, he is a lecturer in Psychiatry at Weill-Cornell Medical College [2], where he lectures on depression, schizophrenia, and autism. He serves on the boards of the Depression Center of the University of Michigan, the Columbia University Medical School (Board of Visitors), Columbia Psychiatry, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory; he is also on the advisory board of the Mental Health Policy Forum at the Mailman School of Public at Columbia University.
In the arts, he serves on the boards of the Alliance for the Arts, the World Monuments Fund, and Yaddo (member of the corporation). He is also a member of the Asian Art Council of the Guggenheim and the Chairman's Council of the Metropolitan Museum, and serves on the Library Council of the New York Public Library.
He is also on the board of The Alex Fund, which supports gypsy education in Romania.
He is a fellow of Berkeley College at Yale University and is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities,[3] and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.