William Finnegan

William Finnegan is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of works of international journalism, including Crossing the Line, about a year teaching in apartheid South Africa, and Cold New World. He was born in New York City and raised in Los Angeles and Hawaii, where he took up surfing in his youth; it became a lifelong passion and he still surfs off Long Island. He wrote the two part New Yorker series Playing Doc's Games about the surf scene at San Francisco's Ocean Beach, regarded as one of the best pieces of journalism on surfing, and his autobiographical book Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.