Susan Orlean is the author of eight books, including The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup; My Kind of Place; Saturday Night; and Lazy Little Loafers. In 1999, she published The Orchid Thief, a narrative about orchid poachers in Florida, which was made into the Academy Award-winning film, "Adaptation” starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep. Her book, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, a New York Times Notable book, won the Ohioana Book Award and the Richard Wall Memorial Award. Her book about the arson fire at the Los Angeles Public Library, The Library Book, is being published in 2018.

Orlean has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1992, covering such subjects as taxidermy, fashion, umbrellas, origami, dogs, and chickens. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2003. In 2012 she received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Michigan. In 2014, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Arts/Nonfiction. She has managed to finish most of her books thanks to residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Orlean lives in Los Angeles and in Columbia County, New York, with her husband and son and a small menagerie of animals.