“When I was a kid, we had this great advantage of there being no YA books. You read kid books and then went on to adult books. When I was 12 or 13, I read all of Steinbeck and Hemingway. I thought I should read everything a writer writes.”

American journalist and author

Mark Kurlansky is an American journalist and author. He is known for writing both fiction and nonfiction, and for books that reached a wide international readership. His 1997 book Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World became an international bestseller and was translated into more than fifteen languages. He also wrote Nonviolence: Twenty-five Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea, which won the nonfiction prize for the 2007 Dayton Literary Peace Prize.