Mark Bowden
2011 Maryland Author Award Winner

Mark Bowden is a best-selling author and journalist. His book Black Hawk Down, a finalist for the National Book Award, was the basis of the film of the same name. His book Killing Pablo won the Overseas Press Club’s 2001 Cornelius Ryan Award as the book of the year. His most recent books, both bestsellers, are Guests of the Ayatollah, an account of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, listed by Newsweek as one of “The 50 Books for Our Times,” and The Best Game Ever, the story of the 1958 NFL championship game won by the Baltimore Colts over the New York Giants. He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and a national correspondent for The Atlantic. Mark has received The Abraham Lincoln Literary Award and the International Thriller Writers’ “True Thriller Award” for lifetime achievement, and served as a judge for the National Book Awards in 2005.

He is a 1973 graduate of Loyola University Maryland, where he taught from 2001 until 2010. A reporter and columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer for more than 30 years, Bowden now teaches journalism at the University of Delaware and lives in Oxford, Pennsylvania. He is married with five children and two granddaughters.