Robert Kolker is the author of Hidden Valley Road, an instant #1 New York Times best-seller and selection of Oprah's Book Club that was named a Top Ten Book of the Year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Slate; one of the year’s best by NPR, the Boston Globe, the New York Post, and Amazon; the #1 book of the year by People; and one of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2020. His previous work includes Lost Girls, also a New York Times best-seller and New York Times Notable Book, and one of Slate’s best nonfiction books of the quarter century. He is a National Magazine Award finalist whose journalism has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Wired, O, the Oprah Magazine, the Marshall Project, Bloomberg Businessweek, and New York magazine.
"It takes a rarer, more humane and imaginative writer to show the dented magnificence and universal sorrow within ordinary lives, and make you realize how much more they are worth."
– Laura Miller, Salon"Hidden Valley Road is an extraordinary scientific detective story and family saga…. Robert Kolker ushers us into the world of the Galvin family in a very intimate way. Reading their story shows us the way secrets and dysfunction fester—and how families ultimately survive and endure."
– Oprah Winfrey, Oprah’s Book Club
Kolker’s magazine journalism most often takes the form of gripping, humane narratives. Among his subjects: perhaps the most unbelievable survival story to come out of World War II; the most audacious embezzlement scandal in the history of American public education; the man who was accidentally released from prison 88 years early; the comedy stars who created and starred in This Is Spinal Tap and somehow never saw a dime’s profit from it; the scientists who developed the revolutionary gene-editing process known as CRISPR and then went to battle over the credit; the slow, sad decline of the New York City subway system; the police detective who brought down perhaps the world’s largest online child-exploitation ring; the defiant Ukrainian oligarch in the crosshairs of the investigators probing Donald Trump; the tenacious data miner who has built a tool to find serial killers and close countless ancient cold cases (if police are willing to use it); the “Subway Superman” grappling with sudden fame; a young academic star rising up from the inner city, only to be gunned down in her old neighborhood; the secret history of how the FBI finally tracked down the fugitive abortion-doctor assassin James Kopp; and the FBI Osama bin Laden expert killed in the World Trade Center attacks. His 2006 investigation into sexual abuse in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community helped bring an abuser to justice and was nominated for a National Magazine Award. His exploration of an eighteen-year murder-exoneration case and the police tactics that can lead to false confessions received the Harry Frank Guggenheim 2011 Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting Award from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Other articles of note include the police shooting of Sean Bell, a close look at New York’s homelessness epidemic, and New York’s cover stories about airport safety and security, cheating at Stuyvesant High School, and Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger’s Miracle on the Hudson.
Lost Girls was adapted for a feature film, directed by Liz Garbus and starring Amy Ryan and Gabriel Byrne, released by Netflix in 2020.
“The Bad Superintendent,” Kolker's 2004 New York magazine story about a public-school embezzlement scandal, was adapted for the feature film Bad Education, starring Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney, released on HBO in 2020.
For a selective archive of Robert Kolker’s stories, click here.
For information about Hidden Valley Road, click here.
For information about Lost Girls, click here.
For speaking inquiries via the PRH Speakers Bureau, click here.
You can contact Robert Kolker directly at bob@robertkolker.com.