John Colapinto

John Colapinto (born 1958 in Toronto, Ontario) is an award-winning journalist, author and novelist and is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Career

Prior to working on staff at The New Yorker, Colapinto's articles appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Mademoiselle, Us, New York and The New York Times Magazine, and in 1995 he became a contributing editor at Rolling Stone.[1][2]

Writing

For Rolling Stone, Colapinto wrote feature stories on a variety of subjects including AIDS, kids and guns, heroin in the music business, and Penthouse magazine creator, Bob Guccione.

In 1998, Colapinto published a 20,000 word feature story in Rolling Stone titled "The True Story of John/Joan", an account of David Reimer, who had undergone a sex change in infancy—a medical experiment long heralded as a success, but which was, in fact, a failure. The story, which detailed not only Reimer's tortured life, but the medical scandal surrounding its cover-up, won the ASME Award for reporting. In 2000, Colapinto published a book-length account of the case, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl. The book was a New York Times bestseller and the film rights were bought by director Peter Jackson.

Colapinto also wrote a novel, About the Author, a tale of literary envy and theft. It was published in August 2001 and was a number 6 pick on the Book Sense 76 list of best novels of the season; it was a nominee for the IMPAC literary award and for a number of years was under option by DreamWorks where playwright Patrick Marber wrote a screen adaptation. The film rights to the novel have since been acquired by producer Scott Rudin.

Colapinto's second novel, "Undone," will be published by HarperCollins in April 2015.

As a staff writer for The New Yorker, Colapinto has written about subjects as diverse as medicinal leeches; Sotheby's auctioneer Tobias Meyer; fashion designers Karl Lagerfeld and Rick Owens; the linguistic oddities of the Pirahã people (an Amazonian tribe); and Paul McCartney.[3] His piece on the Pirahã was anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing (2008); his New Yorker story about retail loss prevention was included in The Best American Crime Reporting (2009);[4] and his New Yorker profile of neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran was selected by Freeman Dyson for inclusion in The Best American Science and Nature Writing.[5]

Awards and nominations

Colapinto's Guccione story for Rolling Stone was a finalist for the ASME Award in profile writing in 2004.

ASME Award for reporting: "The True Story of John/Joan" in ''Rolling Stone.

Personal life

John Colapinto lives on New York City's Upper East Side. He is married to fashion illustrator and artist, Donna Mehalko, and they have one son.

Bibliography

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

Books

Essays and reporting

References

  1. ↑ "John Colapinto". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 2014-09-29.
  2. ↑ "Biography John Colapinto". Book Reporter. Real Talk publising. Retrieved 2014-09-29.
  3. ↑ Colapinto, John (4 June 2007). "When I'm Sixty-Four". The New Yorker. Retrieved 24 February 2012.(subscription required)
  4. ↑ Toobin, Jeffrey; Penzler, Otto; Cook, Thomas H. (2009-09-02). The Best American Crime Reporting 2009. HarperCollins. pp. 275–. ISBN 978-0-06-149084-2. Retrieved 8 April 2011.
  5. ↑ Colapinto, John (2010). "Brain Games". In Dyson, Freeman; Folger, Tim. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010. The best American series. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 108. ISBN 9780547327846. Retrieved 2014-09-27.

External links