Sign up and be the first to know about new speakers and event ideas. William Finnegan is an award-winning journalist and the author of five books. If President Trump had a reading list, Finnegan would not be on it. He and his friend Bryan Di Salvatore — who in another unlikely coincidence would end up, like Finnegan, on the staff of The New Yorker — had it to themselves for weeks. Before taking the wave, the other guy glanced over his shoulder, did a double-take and shouted in an Aussie accent: "If you're who I think you are, good book!". A New Yorker staff writer since 1987, Finnegan has reported extensively on conflict and culture in many different parts of the world, including Africa, Mexico, Central America, South America, Eastern Europe, the Persian Gulf, and the United States. By then (and still) a staff writer for The New Yorker, he worried people would take him less seriously for outing himself as a surfer. In the mid-'80s, he was living in San Francisco, near Ocean Beach, when The New Yorker commissioned a profile of Renneker, a doctor and fanatically evangelical surfer. It was anything but. Finnegan has received numerous accolades for his work at The New Yorker. "She's a beautiful climber," he says. It’s a fair question, a fair comparison. Now you’re using “barbaric” in the bad sense, as in vicious, winner-take-all. Some were already crowded. Photo: Mike Cordesius. His wide-angle curiosity and sympathies open up new worlds with self-deprecating humor and sensitivity. But that has seemed like strictly local luck. Learn More. My goals as a writer, my ambitions, were already shifting hard in the direction of more transparency, less ornamentation, but teaching high school in a black township in apartheid South Africa was so politically intense that it gave me a new focus — on power, social control, poverty, racism, revolution, conflict. The book wins a Pulitzer Prize — the first, and surely the last, to be won by a piece of surf writing — and is included on then-President Barack Obama’s summer reading list. Finnegan will speak at Readings Hawthorn (Melbourne) on July 31, Adelaide on August 1, Berkelouw Mona Vale (Sydney) on August 2, Newcastle on August 3 and Byron Bay Writers' Festival August 5-7. Like Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, it is a sympathetic examination of what happens when literary ideas of freedom and purity take hold of a young mind and fling his body out into the far reaches of the world. Finnegan grew up eventually, but only after a fashion. Indeed, Barbarian Days is in large part a chronicle of his struggle to square the unruliness of youth with the responsibilities of adulthood and citizenship. But you remind me of the reaction that an old friend in Cape Town had when I told her the title of the book. [A] lyrical, intellectual memoir. Please enter your email so we can keep you updated with news, features and the latest offers. "It's twice as hollow and thick. I even enjoy the lulls. With surfing, colour falls away.”, We test and review the best surfing board shorts on the market for summer 2017, Tuberiding school for beginners and experts. It’s communication, not masturbation, at least when it goes well. Which brings us nicely round to the subject of barbarians, and the many contradictions entailed by that word and its variants. She is 14, four years older than Finnegan when he started surfing. I was duly taken in hand. It’s an unlikely story. Finnegan was appalled to find Norman Mailer, one of his favourite writers, failed the test. Barbarian Days is full of close calls: waves in Hawaii and Madeira and California that hold Finnegan down long enough for him to wonder whether he will come up again. I actually wrote quite a bit more about his displeasure, even quoting from a long, angry, eloquent letter he wrote me, and arguing with him where I thought he had it wrong, while conceding other points — but that material was all cut, on the advice of my editor. I think you’ve pretty well nailed it. In addition to his work as a journalist, Finnegan is the author of the memoir Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, which received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Autobiography and was one of the most acclaimed nonfiction books of the year. A legendary tube on Nias, off the western coast of Sumatra, has been better than ever since an earthquake raised the reef in 2005. In this talk, Finnegan explores the background and stories behind the book, as well as the pleasures and pitfalls of memoir as a genre. In El Salvador, covering the 1989 elections, he saw a Dutch cameraman shot dead by the army. In the end, I made the decisions about what to put in and what to leave out, of course, but with considerable input from friends and frenemies and only after some complicated negotiations. I guess I’d even take back some of my snarky dismissal of its potential for character-building, since it does reward self-reliance, doggedness, daring, and other good and admirable qualities. Read our full Privacy Policy as well as Terms & Conditions. She said it wasn’t nearly as fascinating as I thought it was. Podders Paul and Ben are back with Episode 9 surfing’s favourite broadcast of any kind! Barbarian Days is a coming-of-age story, a social history of a particular era of free-range American childhood, an introduction to the esoteric language and customs of surfing, and a lament for paradise(s) lost. In autumn, they watch hurricanes wreaking havoc in the Caribbean and hope they'll reach the eastern seaboard. The lulls alone are too much for an ordinary audience. “Gorgeously written and intensely felt… Dare I say that we all need Mr. Finnegan… as a role model for a life fully, thrillingly, lived.” —Wall Street Journal. It would be so ironic if I broke the vow I made in print and drowned on podcast.'". As his old friend Mark Renneker says, surfing is a "path", not a sport. No, I don’t think there’s much hope of bringing about a more civilized lineup — which isn’t to say that all lineups are vicious. Incandescent… I’d sooner press this book upon on a nonsurfer, in part because nothing I’ve read so accurately describes the feeling of being stoked or the despair of being held under…. Even a surf memoir can be fun and worthwhile, in theory. In 1994 he married Caroline Rule, a Zimbabwean lawyer. They study forecasts and buoy data, and keep surf cams open on their desktop, ready to drop everything at the sight of a big swell and an offshore wind. Worried that he might be tiring of long-winded interviews about his most recent book, I foolishly attempted to steer things in the direction of puerility, sending him a list of brief and desultory questions. William Finnegan is an award-winning reporter, a staff writer at, William Finnegan travels from New York, NY, Adventure and the Great Outdoors Speakers, “Surf Europe Meets | ‘Barbarian Days’ Pulitzer Winning Author William Finnegan”, “William Finnegan on Surf Writing and Winning a Pulitzer”, “A Lifelong Surfer Explains Why There’s No Such Thing As A ‘Perfect’ Wave”. She was the hero of my first published book, “Some barbarians are excellent at sharing — better than capitalists, certainly.”. William Finnegan's Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize and was one of the most praised nonfiction books of the year. American investors had turned Tavarua into a luxury resort. But then the story William Finnegan had to tell wasn’t a particularly likely one either, even if the full …