Caroline Alexander

Caroline Alexander is a British author, classicist, and filmmaker. She is the author of the best-selling The Endurance and The Bounty and other works of literary non-fiction, such as The Way to Xanadu and The War that Killed Achilles. In 2015, she published a new translation of Homer's Iliad. Alexander is also a writer and producer of documentaries such as The Endurance (based on her book of the same title) and Tiger Tiger.

Born March 13, 1956, in the United States to British parents, Alexander grew up in North Florida but traveled widely, living in the West Indies, Italy, England, Ireland, and the Netherlands. She began her classical studies at Florida State University in her senior year of high school. In 1977, among the first class of female Rhodes Scholars, she attended Somerville College, Oxford, taking her degree in Philosophy and Theology.

Between 1982 and 1985, she established a small department of classics at the University of Malawi in south-central Africa. Following this, she obtained her doctorate in Classics at Columbia University as a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. An avid athlete, Alexander was among the first women admitted to the US National Modern Pentathlon Training program, competing in three national championships for this sport, and was an alternate for the 1982 US World Team.

Alexander began her career as a freelance writer in graduate school and has published widely on subjects ranging from Antarctic exploration, travels in central Africa, tigers, butterfly poachers, ancient history, lost treasure, Xanadu, and military subjects such as shell shock and blast-induced neurotrauma. She has published two New York Times best-sellers (The Endurance and The Bounty).

Alexander was a Contributing Writer for National Geographic Magazine for many years and has also written for The New Yorker, Outside, and Smithsonian, among other publications; her work has appeared in a number of anthologies of literary non-fiction.

Her National Geographic Magazine cover story, “The Invisible War on The Brain,” was praised for exploring the effects of blast-induced trauma on modern soldiers and nominated for a Kavli Science Journalism Award. Alexander is a member of the American Philological Association, the Royal Geographical Society, the Explorer's Club, and the Directors Guild of America.