Robert Kolker

Robert Kolker is an American journalist and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. His long-form reporting has also appeared in The Atlantic, Wired, Bloomberg Businessweek and New York magazine. A National Magazine Award finalist, he received the 2011 Harry Frank Guggenheim Award for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting.

Kolker writes deeply reported narrative nonfiction, often using one family or criminal case to expose failures in larger institutions. Lost Girls follows five women connected to the Long Island serial-killer case while examining how their disappearances were treated by police and society. It was adapted as a Netflix film. His New York magazine reporting on a public-school embezzlement scandal became the basis for the film Bad Education.

Hidden Valley Road turns to the Galvins, a Colorado family with twelve children, six of whom were diagnosed with schizophrenia. Kolker moves between their private history and scientists’ changing attempts to understand the illness, giving the family members distinct points of view rather than reducing them to a case study. The book was an Oprah’s Book Club selection and one of The New York Times Book Review’s ten best books of 2020.

Start with Hidden Valley Road. Its combination of family history, psychiatric research and careful characterization shows Kolker’s method at full strength, while making difficult science accessible without losing sight of the people whose lives shaped that research.