Laura Hillenbrand

Laura Hillenbrand is an American author of narrative non-fiction, born in Fairfax, Virginia, on 15 May 1967, who lives in Washington, D.C. She studied at Kenyon College in Ohio but fell ill with chronic fatigue syndrome and had to leave before graduating, and she wrote her books while living with that illness. Her New Yorker essay about it, A Sudden Illness (2003), won an award.

Seabiscuit: An American Legend (2001), the story of the famous racehorse, won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year and became a 2003 film. Unbroken (2010), about the athlete and prisoner of war Louis Zamperini, is her most read book, with more than a million Goodreads ratings, and it too was filmed. The two books together have sold more than 13 million copies. Her journalism on racing has appeared in The New Yorker, Equus and American Heritage, and a 1998 article on Seabiscuit won the Eclipse Award for Magazine Writing.