William Finnegan is an author and staff writer with the New Yorker best known for covering conflicts in Somalia, Sudan and Mexico, and gritty corners of America and South Africa. War and peace, life and death, policy failures and injustice. He has covered it all.
So, it makes perfect sense that his new memoir is about surfing. His new book – already a bestseller - is Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. Finnegan says surfing only looks like a sport and to initiates, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life.
Finnegan is the author of several books: Cold New World, A Complicated War, and Crossing the Line. He has twice been a National Magazine Award finalist and has won numerous journalism awards. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1987.
