Bob Shacochis

Bob Shacochis is an American fiction writer and literary journalist. Shacochis specializes in fiction and non-fiction. His first collection of stories, Easy in the Islands, won the National Book Award for First Fiction in 1985, and his second collection, The Next New World, was awarded the Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1989.

Bob Shacochis was born in 1951 in Pennsylvania but grew up in the Washington, D.C., suburb of McLean, Virginia. He studied at the University of Missouri and the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

A contributing editor for Outside and Harper's, Shacochis has been a GQ columnist and writer for numerous other national publications.

His debut novel Swimming in the Volcano (1993) was a finalist for the National Book Award. For his second novel, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul (2013), Bob Shacochis received one of the most prestigious literary awards — the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for fiction. The Woman Who Lost Her Soul is a portrait of America, set in four countries over fifty years, and the use of war as an instrument of gain.

Shacochis's first full-length non-fiction book was The Immaculate Invasion (1999). His non-fiction writing aligns with the influential style of New Journalism that gained popularity through prominent figures like Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and Hunter S. Thompson during the 1960s and 1970s.

The most recent, Kingdoms in the Air, a collection of Shacochis's travel and adventure essays, was published in 2016.

He currently teaches creative writing at Florida State University.

Bob Shacochis lives in Tallahassee.

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