Frank Schaeffer In Conversation with Andrea Pitzer, exploring her work and the themes of her book, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.
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Andrea Pitzer is a writer who loves to unearth lost or forgotten history. Her third book, Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World, narrates the three Arctic voyages of Dutch navigator William Barents, who wound up stranded on Nova Zembla during the winter of 1596.
Events and ideas that were once common knowledge but have fallen from public memory fascinate her, as does humanity’s tendency not to learn from history. After research and reporting on four continents, Andrea feels most at home in libraries or on a boat in the Arctic, where she has sailed on multiple expeditions.
In addition to Icebound, she is the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, which traces the idea of mass civilian detention without trial from its beginnings, through Auschwitz and beyond. Her first book, The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, explores how the brilliant Russian émigré folded the tragedies of his family and his century into his novels in ways that went unnoticed.
Andrea’s writing has appeared many places in print and online, from The Washington Post, The Atlantic, New York, The New York Review of Books, Outside, The Los Angeles Review of Books, GQ, The Globe and Mail, The Daily Beast, Vox, Slate, and USA Today to Longreads and Lapham’s Quarterly. She has spoken on her work at the 92nd Street Y and Smithsonian Associates, as well as presenting on panels at the Modern Language Association (MLA), the International Journalism Festival, and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). She has lectured on history and narrative journalism in the U.S. and abroad.
She received an undergraduate degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in 1994, and later studied at MIT and Harvard as an affiliate of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. In 2009, she founded Nieman Storyboard, the narrative nonfiction site for the foundation, which she edited until 2012.
Before that, she was a freelance journalist, a music critic, a portrait painter, a French translator, a record store manager, and a martial arts and self-defense instructor (but not all at the same time). With ASA certifications for keelboat and bareboat cruising, Andrea is also certified to carry a rifle for defense against polar bears in the Norwegian Arctic. She grew up in West Virginia and currently lives with her family near Washington, DC.