Michael Scott Moore is a journalist and a novelist, author of a comic novel about L.A., Too Much of Nothing, as well as a travel book about surfing, Sweetness and Blood, which was named a best book of 2010 by The Economist. He grew up in California, but worked for several years as an editor and writer at Spiegel Online in Berlin. During a reporting trip to Somalia in early 2012, he was kidnapped and held hostage by pirates for 32 months. The Desert and the Sea, a memoir about that ordeal, came out in 2018 and became an international bestseller.
At MacDowell he worked on a new novel about drones, which he started drafting in Somalia on a series of flimsy notebooks.
