Daniel Mason is an American novelist and physician. He is the author of The Piano Tuner (2002), A Far Country (2007), The Winter Soldier (2018), A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (2020)--a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize--and North Woods (2023). He was raised in Palo Alto, California, and received a B.A. in biology from Harvard University, later graduating from the UCSF School of Medicine. He wrote The Piano Tuner while still a medical student. It was later the basis for a 2004 opera of the same name (composed by Nigel Osborne to a libretto by Amanda Holden), and adapted to the stage by Lifeline Theatre in Chicago.
His work has been translated into 28 languages, awarded a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His short stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Zoetrope: All Story, Zyzzyva, Narrative, and Lapham’s Quarterly, and have been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a National Magazine Award and an O. Henry Prize. An assistant professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry, his research and teaching interests include the subjective experience of mental illness and the influence of literature, history, and culture on the practice of medicine.
