John Burnham Schwartz

John Burnham Schwartz grew up in New York City. At Harvard College, he majored in Japanese studies, and upon graduation accepted a position with a prominent Wall Street investment bank, before finally turning the position down after selling his first novel. That book, Bicycle Days, a coming of age story about a young American man in Japan, was published in 1989 on his 24th birthday. It went on to become a critically acclaimed bestseller.

Reservation Road, his second novel about a family tragedy and its aftermath, was published in 1998, also critically acclaimed and a bestseller. The book was made into a major motion picture based on Schwartz’s screenplay. The film starred Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Connelly, and was directed by Terry George.

Schwartz went on to publish Claire Marvel, a love story set in America and France, and, at the beginning of 2008, The Commoner, a novel inspired by the lives of the empress and crown princess of Japan. Spanning seventy years of modern Japanese history and looking deep into the secret, ancient world of the Japanese Imperial Family, The Commoner has won Schwartz the best reviews and sales of his career, and is already in its seventh printing.

Schwartz’s work has been translated into twenty-five languages. He is a recipient of a Lyndhurst Prize for mastery in the art of fiction, and his journalism has appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, and Vogue.

Since writing the script for Reservation Road, Schwartz has become a screenwriter as well as a novelist. His current project for Sony Pictures, an adaptation of New York Times editor Dana Canedy’s forthcoming memoir A Journal for Jordan, is set to star Denzel Washington.

Schwartz has taught fiction writing at Harvard, The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Sarah Lawrence College, and is an associate director of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, one of the leading literary festivals in the United States.

He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife, screenwriter and food writer Aleksandra Crapanzano, and their son Garrick.