Daniel Mason
Daniel Mason is a physician and 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). 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. The Piano Tuner was produced as an opera by Music Theatre Wales for the Royal Opera House in London, and adapted to the stage by Lifeline Theatre in Chicago. 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.
“The conversations rests uneasily; one doesn't expect good-byes to be burdened by such trivialities. This is not how it is in the books, he thinks, or in the theater, and he feels the need to speak of mission, of duty, of love. They reach home and close the door and he doesn't drop her hand. Where speech fails, touch compensates.”
“A world full of people who want to know what you will be, what is your skill and what is your purpose. In the north, if a man had come and said "What will you be? What will you do?" I would have laughed at this kind of person that lives all the time in the future.”