Andrew Solomon studied at Yale University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1985, and then at Jesus College Cambridge, where he received the top first-class degree in English in his year, the only foreign student ever to be so-honored, as well as the University writing prize. He is now pursuing a PhD at Cambridge in Social and Political Studies (psychology), working on the relation between biological and psychosocial models of early attachment between mothers and infants. In 1988, he began his study of Russian artists, which culminated with the publication of The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost (Knopf, 1991). He was asked in 1993 to consult with members of the National Security Council on Russian affairs and wrote parts of Clinton’s first Russia speeches; that year he was also named a Contributing Writer of The New York Times Magazine, a position he held until 2001. His recently reissued first novel, A Stone Boat (Faber, 1994), was a runner up for the LA Times First Fiction prize and was a national bestseller; it has now been published in 5 languages.

Mr. Solomon’s most recent book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, has won him fourteen national awards, including the 2001 National Book Award, and is being published in 22 languages. It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  It has been on the New York Times bestseller list in both hardback and paperback; it has also been a bestseller in seven foreign countries. Among the honors garnered by The Noonday Demon are the Books for a Better Life Award, the Ken Award of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, the QPB New Visions Award, the Voice of Mental Health award of the Jed Foundation and the National Mental Health Association, the Lammy for the best nonfiction of 2001, the Mind Book of the Year for Great Britain, the Prism Award of the NDMDA, the Charles T. Rubey LOSS award, the Silvano Arieti Award, the Dede Hirsch Community Service Award, and the Erasing The Stigma Leadership Award. It was chosen an American Library Association Notable Book of 2001 and a New York Times Notable Book.  It was written with the assistance of a Bogliasco Fellowship from the Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities. The NY Times review described it as “All-encompassing, brave, deeply humane...a book of remarkable depth, breadth and vitality...open-minded, critically informed and poetic all at the same time...fearless, and full of compassion.” Mr. Solomon has lectured on depression around the world, including recent stints at Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Cambridge, and the Library of Congress.

Andrew Solomon’s writing on cystic fibrosis has won him the Angel of Awareness Award of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, as well as the Clarion Award for Journalism. He is a regular contributor to numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Artforum. He has written essays for many recent anthologies and books of criticism, including an essay for My Father Married Your Mother: Writers Talk About Stepfamilies (ed. Anne Burt) pub. by Norton, one for Coach (ed. Andrew Blauner), pub. by Warner Books, 2005, one for Who Owns The Past: Cultural Policy, Cultural Property, and the Law (ed Kate Fitz Gibbon), pub. by Rutgers University Press, 2005, one for The Proust Project (ed. Andre Aciman), pub by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004, the lead one for Oleg Vassiliev: Memory Speaks (ed. Natalia Kolodzei), pub. by Palace Editions, 2004, one for Loss Within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS (ed. Edmund White), pub. by University of Wisconsin Press, 2001, and one for Our Mother's Spirits (ed. Bob Blauner), pub. by HarperCollins, 1998. His writing was also selected for Best American Travel Writing 2003 (ed. Ian Frazier), pub. Houghton Mifflin, 2003, and he has written critical afterwords to the reissues of Corrigan by Caroline Blackwood, pub NY Review of Books Press, 2002, and to Bertram Cope's Year by Henry Blake Fuller, pub. by Turtle Point Press, 1999.

He is currently writing a book, to be published in 2008, called A Dozen Kinds of Love: Raising Traumatic Children which deals with how families accommodate children who are deaf, who are autistic, who are prodigies, who have committed crimes, and so on. He is also working on a comic novel.

He has joined the board of the National Mental Health Awareness Campaign and of the Depression Center of the University of Michigan. Additionally, he serves on the boards of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Alliance for the Arts, the Alex Fund, the American Council for Cultural Policy, the Worcester Foundation for Medical Research, the Rita Fund, the Larry Kramer Initiative for Gay and Lesbian Studies at Yale University, and the World Monuments Fund. He is on the advisory boards of Outward Bound and the Mental Health Policy forum at Columbia University, and on the Conservators’ Council of the New York Public Library. He is a fellow of Berkeley College at Yale University and is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Council on Foreign Relations. He maintains residences in London and New York and is a dual national.