Laura Hillenbrand

Laura Hillenbrand was born in Fairfax, Virginia, and spent much of her childhood riding horses on her father's farm in Sharpsburg, Maryland. At 19, in her second year at Kenyon College in Ohio, she suddenly fell ill and had to leave school. Doctors later diagnosed chronic fatigue syndrome, and she has lived with it ever since. For many years she could rarely leave her home in Washington, D.C., and she researched and wrote both of her books there, largely by phone.

She began as a freelance writer for horse magazines such as Equus. A 1998 article on the racehorse Seabiscuit won an Eclipse Award and grew into Seabiscuit: An American Legend (2001). It tells how an undersized, overlooked horse became a champion during the Great Depression. The book became the movie Seabiscuit (2003).

Unbroken (2010) tells the life of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner whose bomber crashed into the Pacific in 1943. He drifted for 47 days on a raft and then survived more than two years in Japanese prison camps. It became a movie in 2014. Her health later improved enough for her to drive across the country to Oregon.