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Author’s bio

David Sheff is the author of Beautiful Boy, based on his article, “My Addicted Son,” which appeared in the New York Times Magazine. The article won a special award from the American Psychological Association for “outstanding contribution to the understanding of addiction.” Beautiful Boy, a number-1 New York Times Best Seller, was named the Best Nonfiction Book of 2009 by Entertainment Weekly and it won first place in the 2009 Barnes and Noble Discover Award in nonfiction.  Sheff's research and writing about this subject is ongoing; he contributed to HBO's Addiction: Why Can’t They Just Stop and is writing a new book about mental health and addiction care in America. In 2009, Sheff was named to the Time 100, Time Magazine's list of the World's Most Influential People.

Along with The New York Times Magazine, Sheff has also written for The New York Times, Wired, Playboy, Fortune, Rolling Stone, Outside, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Esquire and Observer Magazine in England, Foreign Literature in Russia, and Playboy (Shueisha) in Japan. He has conducted seminal interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, nuclear physicist Ted Taylor, Congressman Barney Frank, Steve Jobs, Tom Hanks, Betty Friedan, Keith Haring, Jack Nicholson, Carl Sagan, Salman Rushdie, OJ Simpson, Fareed Zakaria, and others. He also wrote an award-winning documentary about John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and a radio special about Harper Lee’sTo Kill a Mockingbird, both for National Public Radio. He wrote and edited Heart Play: Unfinished Dialogue, which won a Grammy Award nomination for Best Spoken Word Recording of 1984.

Sheff is the author of Game Over, published in a dozen languages, called “the bible of the videogame industry” by The Wall Street Journal, and “beguiling” and  "irresistible. . . almost as hypnotic as a successful video game" by the New York Times. Author Gore Vidal said that in China Dawn, Sheff’s book about the Internet revolution in China, “China, at the turn of the century, comes alive.” All We Are Saying, based on Sheff’s interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1980, was a Literary Guild Selection book. Charles Champlin, Arts Editor of the Los Angeles Times, wrote: "David Sheff's sympathetic questions evoked so much of the Beatle past and of Lennon's intellectual past and present and future plans that the interview would hardly have been less engrossing and important even it if were not illuminated by tragedy."

Sheff  graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. He lives with his family in Point Reyes Station, California. 

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