Blake Nelson [1] is an American author of adult and children's literature.[2][3] He grew up in Portland, Oregon, and attended Wesleyan University and New York University.[4] He lives in Hillsboro, Oregon, in the Portland metropolitan area.[5]
Blake Nelson | |
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Born | Portland, Oregon |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Wesleyan University New York University Jesuit High School (Portland) |
Notable works | Girl Paranoid Park Recovery Road |
Nelson began his career writing short humor pieces for Details magazine in the mid-'90s. These articles, with titles including "How to be an Expatriot" and "How to Live on $3600 a year", explored the slacker West Coast lifestyle.[4]
His first novel Girl was excerpted in Sassy magazine in three successive issues.[6] The mail Sassy received in response was key to the eventual publication of Girl.[7] Girl has since been published in eight foreign countries and made into a film of the same name. The novel was reissued as a young adult novel by Simon & Schuster young adult imprint Simon Pulse in October 2007.
Nelson's novel Paranoid Park[8] was made into a film of the same name by Gus Van Sant. The novel, about skateboarding teenagers, won the prestigious Grinzane Cavour Prize in Italy.[9] The film won a special 60th Anniversary prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007.
A sequel to his first novel Girl, Dream School was released in December 2011 and follows the protagonist, Andrea Marr, to Wellington College, an eastern liberal-arts college modeled on Wesleyan, Nelson's alma mater.[10] The Seattle Stranger called the Girl/Dream School series "The missing link between Bret Easton Ellis and Tao Lin."
Nelson's 2011 novel Recovery Road was adapted by Disney into a TV drama of the same name. It premiered in January 2016 on ABC Family (Freeform).
Blake Nelson has also contributed poetry, essays and non-fiction to The New York Times, The Quarterly (Gordon Lish), The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Post and Conde Nast Traveler.
He currently writes travel pieces at https://blakenelson.substack.com/
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