Reading, by New Yorker staff writer William Finnegan

William Finnegan is the author of Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life; Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country; A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique; Dateline Soweto: Travels with Black South African Reporters; and Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of Apartheid. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1987. He has won numerous journalism awards, including two Overseas Press Club awards since 2009, and in 2007 he served as a visiting reporter for the Middlebury Fellowships in Environmental Journalism. He lives in New York.