William Finnegan in The Green Room

Saturday, December 3, 2016 at Maui Arts & Cultural Center, McCoy Studio Theater

“As Finnegan demonstrates, surfing, like good writing, is an act of vigilant noticing.” – The New York Times Book Review

The Merwin Conservancy proudly presented an evening with William Finnegan, a life-long surfer, an award-winning journalist and longtime staffer at The New Yorker, and 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner for his best-selling surf memoir, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, which was also listed as one of five books on President Obama’s 2016 Summer Reading List.

In awarding Finnegan the prize, the Pulitzer Prizes Board described Barbarian Days as “an old-school adventure story, and intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting little-understood art.”

William Finnegan has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1987. He grew up in New York and Hawai‘i, and has reported from South Africa, Mozambique, Somalia, Sudan, Mexico, Central America, South America, Spain, Britain, Australia, Madagascar, Ukraine, Moldova, the Gulf States, and the Balkans, as well as from many places in the United States. He has written primarily about politics, war, poverty, race, U.S. foreign policy, organized crime, globalization, and surfing.

He is the author of five books: Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (2015); Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country; A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique; Dateline Soweto: Travels with Black South African Reporters; and Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of Apartheid.

This evening was generously presented by FIM Group.