Sam Sussman

Sussman grew up with his mother on fourteen acres in the woods in the Hudson Valley^[where?]. His mother, Fran Sussman, was a holistic health practitioner, educator, and writer.^[3] Sussman has said that literature was “a love language between my mother and me.” ^[4]

Sussman studied one year at SUNY Binghamton and one year at Christ Church, Oxford, before transferring to Swarthmore College.^[5] He returned to Oxford to complete an M.Phil, writing a dissertation on Rousseau.^[6] While at Oxford, Sussman was an active member of the Oxford Union. ^[7]

Sussman has lived in Berlin and Jerusalem and taught writing and literature seminars in England, India, Peru, and Chile.^[8] While living in England, Sussman won the BAFTA New Writing Award for original screenplay. ^[6] Sussman is a member of PEN America and has participated in the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature three times.^[9]

Boy From the North Country is an autofictional novel based on Sussman’s Harper’s Magazine memoir essay, “The Silent Type: On (Possibly) Being Bob Dylan’s Son."

Kirkus called the novel “the most beautiful and moving mother-son story in recent memory.” ^[2]

Tony Kushner called the novel, “A penetratingly observed exploration of loss and grief, healing and mortality, theology, philosophy, and above all, art—of art as origin and salvation, art as community, seduction, fame, power, holiness. Its language is unguardedly personal, at times uncomfortably intimate, accumulating over and over into moments of stunning poetic force, revelatory insight, heartbreak and wisdom.”^[10]

David Yaffe, author of Like A Complete Unknown, said the novel was, “A monumental event for anyone who cares about Dylan. More meaningfully, the book transforms into an emotionally moving story of what it means to love a mother and be a son. Sussman has written one of the Great Millennial Novels and proved himself an inheritor of Dylan’s lyrical tradition.”  ^[10]

The novel also received praise from Vivian Gornick, Ayad Akhtar, Maria Semple, and Aminatta Forna. ^[10]

Sussman co-founded Extend,^[11] an NGO that brings Americans to Israel-Palestine to meet human rights activists working toward a democratic future.^[12] Extend has been featured in the New York Times^[13] and at the United Nations.^[11]

Sussman lives between his childhood home in the Hudson Valley^[where?] and the walk-up apartment in Yorkville, Manhattan, in which his mother first lived in the early 1970s and much of Boy from the North Country takes place.^[14] Dylan wrote parts of Blood on the Tracks in the apartment.^[15]