Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1986. His work for that publication has earned him both the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting as well as three National Magazine Awards for Essay and Criticism.In 1995, The New Yorker dispatched Gopnik to Paris to write the Paris Journals, in which he described daily life in that city, drawing revelations from everyday observations. A beloved collection of essays called Paris to the Moon grew from his time there, recounting his family's life in the City of Light.
With help from his young son Luke, Gopnik wrote the children's novel The King in the Window, a magical adventure of a young American boy living in Paris.
In his essay collections and New Yorker pieces, Gopnik's topics are imaginative and wide-ranging, from the state of New York department stores ('like luxury lines becalmed in a lagoon') to science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick ('the doomed genius who supplies a style of horrors and frissons') to busyness ('our art form, our civic ritual').
His most recent book, Through the Children's Gate, chronicles his family's relocation to New York. Gopnik also wrote and presented the BBC's Lighting Up New York, a cultural journey through the recent history of New York.