Michael Scott Moore is a journalist and a novelist, author of a comic novel about L.A., Too Much of Nothing, as well as a travel book about surfing, Sweetness and Blood, which was named a best book of 2010 by The Economist. He’s won Fulbright, Logan, and Pulitzer Center grants for his nonfiction, and a MacDowell Colony fellowship for his fiction.
He worked for several years as an editor and writer at Spiegel Online in Berlin. He was kidnapped in early 2012 on a reporting trip to Somalia and held hostage by pirates for 32 months. The Desert and the Sea, a memoir about that ordeal, is out now from HarperCollins.
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Speaking Events
January 31, 2019
Hermosa Beach Historical Society
On the history of surfing, and Sweetness & Blood
6pm
710 Pier Avenue
Hermosa Beach, CA 90254
April 03, 2019
Current Issues Lecture Series
7pm
Memorial Union Building
Strafford Room
83 Main Street
Durham, NH 03824
VIDEOS
Media
My review of Ingrid Betancourt's first novel, The Blue Line, is up at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
While I was in Somalia a man called Geoff Carter wrote about a picture of Indian men surfing on stand-up boards around 1800 off Chennai, which altered the known history of surfing a bit, even though the picture was hiding in plain sight at the Australian National Maritime Museum.
The men from the Naham 3 are all friends of mine — a crew of 26 sailors from southeast Asia who worked on a tuna long-liner flagged in Oman but owned by a company in Taiwan, which abandoned them after Somali pirates hijacked the ship in 2012.
A version of what happened in Somalia is available as a Long Read at The Guardian, and, in somewhat shorter form, for German readers, in Der Spiegel. It’s not even near complete. Enormous parts of the story have been left untold.
Representation
