Sylvia Nasar was born in Bavaria in 1947 to a German mother and Uzbek father. Her family immigrated to the United States in 1951 and lived in New York and Washington, D.C. before moving to Ankara, Turkey in 1960. In 1965, she returned to the U.S. on her own and attended Antioch College where she majored in literature. She also spent a year at the University of Munich. After working for several years, she entered the Ph.D. program in economics at New York University, completing a master’s degree in 1976. For four years, she did research with Nobel Laureate Wassily Leontief at the Institute for Economic Analysis.

At 35, Nasar became a journalist. Since 1983, she has been a writer at Fortune, a columnist at U.S. News & World Report and, until recently, a reporter at The New York Times where she covered economics. She and her husband, Darryl Mcleod, also an economist, have three children, Clara, Lily and Jack, and live in Tarrytown, New York.

A Beautiful Mind, her first book, won the 1998 National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Biography, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography, and inspired a feature movie directed by Ron Howard, as well as a PBS television documentary. Nasar, who edited The Essential John Nash, is currently working on a book about 20th century economic thinkers, and has recently been named the first John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.