About
Jeff Biggers is an award-winning historian, journalist, novelist and playwright. Author of ten books, his work has appeared on National Public Radio and Public Radio International, and in the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Atlantic Monthly, Huffington Post, Salon, The Nation, Brick Magazine (Toronto) and Il Giornale (Italy). As a playwright and performer of monologues, he appears at theatres, festivals, conferences and schools. Based in the US and Italy, Biggers has worked as a writer, performer and educator across the United States, Europe, India, and Mexico.
Through narrative nonfiction, journalism, theatre, and fiction, Biggers focuses on a historical storytelling approach he calls "re-storification," the process of unearthing and forging new stories, rituals, and gatherings that recover the withered or denied strands of history and reshape its continuum between the past and present.
In the fall of 2024, he released his debut novel Disturbing the Bones, with coauthor Andrew Davis, the celebrated film director of The Fugitive, Holes, Perfect Murder and other classic films. A starred review in Publishers Weekly praised the novel for "intense, vivid action and the intricate interweaving."
His latest nonfiction book, In Sardinia: An Unexpected Journey in Italy, released in the spring of 2023, was praised by the Times Literary Supplement as "much more than a travelogue, compendious and evocative," and "an enthusiastic and erudite guide" by the Wall Street Journal. In an Italian review for Sardegnablogger journal, reviewer Fiorenzo Caterini called it "a masterpiece."
Founder of the Climate Narrative Project, an arts and advocacy project, Biggers has given lectures, readings and performances at over 100 universities and schools across the country, from the University of California in Berkeley, the University of Mississippi, Yale University to the University of Rome (La Sapienza). Biggers has served as the Climate Narrative Playwright-in-Residence at Indiana University Northwest, the Sustainability Writer-in-Residence at the University of Iowa, the Campbell-Stripling Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Wesleyan College in Georgia, and delivered the keynote address at numerous literary, urban planning and environmental conferences.
His nonfiction works include The Trials of a Scold, longlisted for the 2018 PEN/Bograd Weld Prize for Biography, State Out of the Union, selected by Publishers Weekly as a Top Ten Social Science Book in 2012; Reckoning at Eagle Creek, recipient of the Delta Award for Literature and the David Brower Award for Environmental Reporting; In the Sierra Madre, winner of the Foreword Magazine Travel Book of the Year Award and the Illinois Arts Council Nonfiction Award; and The United States of Appalachia, praised by the Citizen Times as a "masterpiece of popular history." He also served as co-editor of No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems of Don West, which won the American Book Award, and wrote the foreword to the re-issue of Huey Perry's classic, They'll Cut Off Your Project.
His work has received numerous honors, including an American Book Award, David Brower Award for Environmental Reporting, Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award for Travel Writing, Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Journalism, Delta Award for Literature, Plattner Award for Appalachian Literature, Illinois Arts Council Creative Non-Fiction Award, Southwest Book of the Year, Garst Memorial Award for Media (UN Association Iowa), Calumet Artist Residency and a Field Foundation Fellowship. His play, "4 1/2 Hours: Across the Stones of Fire," won the "Greener Planet Award" at the Planet Connections Theatre Festivity in New York City. Blue Ridge Outdoors Magazine selected Biggers as one of its 100 Pioneers.
Featured Work
In Sardinia: An Unexpected Journey in Italy
Award-winning historian Jeff Biggers opens a new window into the hidden treasures of Sardinia in a groundbreaking travel narrative that crisscrosses one of the most enigmatic places in Italy
After three decades of living and traveling in Italy, Jeff Biggers finally crossed over to Sardinia, uncovering a treasury of stories amid major archaeological discoveries rewriting the history of the Mediterranean.
Based in the bewitching port of Alghero, guided through the island’s rich and largely untranslated literature, he embarked on a rare journey around the island to experience its famed cuisine, wine, traditional rituals and thriving cultural movements.
“Sardinia is something else. Enchanting spaces and distances to travel,” D. H. Lawrence wrote in 1921. On the 100th anniversary of Lawrence’s visit, Biggers opens a new window into the history of the island, chronicling how new archaeological findings have placed the island as one of the cradles of the Bronze Age. From the Neolithic array of Stonehenge-like dolmens and menhir stone formations to the thousands of Bronze Age “nuraghe” towers and burial tombs, the vastness of the uninterrupted cycles of civilizations and their architectural marvels have turned Sardinia into the Mediterranean’s ”open museum.”
Beyond its fabled beaches, reconsidering how its unique history and ways have shaped Italy and Europe today, Biggers explores how travelers must first understand Sardinia and its ancient and modern history to truly understand the rest of Italy.
