Backstage With...: About Scott Simon

Scott Simon is one of America’s most admired writers and broadcasters. He has reported from all fifty states, five continents, and ten wars, from El Salvador to Sarajevo to Afghanistan and Iraq. His books have chronicled character and characters, in war and peace, sports and art, tragedy and comedy.

His radio show, NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon, has been called by the Washington Post, “the most literate, witty, moving, and just plain interesting news show on any dial.” Scott has won every major award in broadcasting, including the Peabody, the Emmy, the Columbia-DuPont, the Ohio State Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the Sidney Hillman Award. He received the Presidential End Hunger Award for his coverage of the Ethiopian civil war and famine, and a special citation from the Peabody Awards for his weekly essays. He has also received the Barry M. Goldwater Award from the Human Rights Fund.

He has hosted many television specials, including the PBS’s State of Mind, and Voices of Vision. The Paterson Project, won a national Emmy, as did his two-hour special from the Rio earth summit meeting. He co-anchored PBS’s Millennium 2000 coverage in concert with the BBC, and has co-hosted the televised Columbia-DuPont Awards. He also became familiar to viewers in Great Britain as host of the continuing BBC series, Eyewitness, and a special on the White House press corps. He has appeared as a guest and commentator on all major networks, including BBC, NBC, CNN, and ESPN.

Scott has contributed articles to the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Times of London, The Guardian, and Gourmet among other publications, and won a James Beard Award for his story, “Conflict Cuisine” in Gourmet. He has received numerous honorary degrees.

Sports Illustrated called his personal memoir Home and Away, extraordinary... uniformly superb... a memoir of such breadth and reach that it compares favorably with Fredrick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes. It was at the top of several non-fiction bestseller lists. His book, Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball, was Barnes and Nobles’ Sports Book of the Year. His novel, Pretty Birds, the story of two teenage girls in Sarajevo during the siege, received rave reviews, Scott Turow calling it, “the most auspicious fiction debut by a journalist of note since Tom Wolfe’s... always gripping, always tender, and often painfully funny. It is a marvel of technical finesse, close observation, and a perfectly pitched heart.” His next novel, Windy City, was published by Random House in March, 2008. It is a political comedy set in the Chicago City Council.

Scott is a native of Chicago and the son of comedian Ernie Simon and Patricia Lyons Simon. His hobbies are books, theater, ballet, British comedy, Mexican cooking and “bleeding for the Chicago Cubs.” Simon appeared as Mother Ginger in the Ballet Austin production of The Nutcracker. He is married to Caroline Richard, a fan of the Yankees and the French national soccer team. They have two daughters, Elise and Lina.