Andrea Pitzer
“In the last decade, I have tried to do things that take some important historical event, add to the knowledge about that event in some way, do an experiential thing, where I’m going to a place or talking to the people who were involved in that event, and then relating it in some way to what’s happening, right now, in the world.”
“The expedition’s highlight reel included everything a polar fan could want: hand-to-hand combat with polar bears and walruses; scurvy and vitamin A poisoning; asphyxiation by carbon dioxide; frostbite, keelhauling and hangings; plus the sighting of a rare atmospheric optical phenomenon called a parhelion…Pitzer writes with care about the Arctic landscape Barents encountered…A reminder that there was once a time when things were unknown.”
“A resonant meditation on human ingenuity, resilience, and hope.”
“A masterful re-creation of a desperate fight for survival [that] takes us back nearly half a millennium and plunks us down in a vividly realized world…More than just another book about a disastrous sea voyage, this is a richly evocative story about a particular period in the history of exploration. Icebound deserves a place beside such classics as Alfred Lansing’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage and Roland Huntford’s The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundson’s Race to the South Pole.”
“Masterly.”
“Drawing on memoirs, histories, and archival sources, [Pitzer] offers a chilling, well-documented history of the camps’ development.... A potent, powerful history of cruelty and dehumanization.”
“In this engrossing history, Pitzer traces the origins of concentration camps and follows their development over more than a century.... Pitzer excels at focusing this sprawling history on the personal level.”
Andrea Pitzer is a writer who loves to unearth lost or forgotten history. Her most recent book is Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World (Scribner, 2021), which narrates the three Arctic voyages of Dutch navigator William Barents, who wound up stranded on Nova Zembla during the winter of 1596. Her other books include One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps (Little, Brown & Co. 2017), which traces the idea of mass civilian detention without trial from its beginnings, through Auschwitz and beyond. It was named one of Smithsonian Magazine’s Ten Best History Books for 2017. Her first book, The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (Pegasus Books, 2013), explores how the brilliant Russian émigré folded the tragedies of his family and his century into his novels in ways that went unnoticed.
Andrea’s writing has appeared many places in print and online, from The Washington Post, The Atlantic, New York, The New York Review of Books, Outside, The Los Angeles Review of Books, GQ, Scientific American, The Globe and Mail, The Daily Beast, Vox, Slate, and USA Today to Longreads and Lapham’s Quarterly. She has spoken on her work at the 92nd Street Y and Smithsonian Associates, as well as presenting on panels at the Modern Language Association (MLA), the International Journalism Festival, and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). She has lectured on history and narrative journalism in the U.S. and abroad.
She received an undergraduate degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in 1994, and later studied at MIT and Harvard as an affiliate of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. In 2009, she founded Nieman Storyboard, the narrative nonfiction site for the foundation, which she edited until 2012.
Before that, she was a freelance journalist, a music critic, a portrait painter, a French translator, a record store manager, and a martial arts and self-defense instructor (but not all at the same time). With ASA certifications for keelboat and bareboat cruising, Andrea is also certified to carry a rifle for defense against polar bears in the Norwegian Arctic. She grew up in West Virginia and currently lives with her family near Washington, DC.
“Drawing on new biographical material and her sharp critical senses, Pitzer reveals the tightly woven subtext of the novels, always keen to shine a light where the deception is not obvious. A brilliant examination that adds to the understanding of an inspiring and enigmatic life.”
“Pitzer, like Nabokov, is a beautiful writer and gimlet-eyed observer, especially about her subject; even as an impoverished refugee living in America, she writes, “Nabokov was never shy about his sense of self.” Her attention to history’s moral components is refreshingly blunt: “The dead are not nameless,” she writes of the writers and others killed in Stalin’s Great Purge of the late 1930s. Inviting us to reconsider Nabokov, Pitzer also introduces herself as a writer worthy of attention.”
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