Dava Sobel Biography
Dava Sobel (b. 1947), a former New York Times science reporter, is the author of Longitude, Galileo's Daughter and The Planets. In her thirty years as a science journalist she has written for many magazines, including Audubon, Discover, Life and The New Yorker, served as a contributing editor to Harvard Magazine and Omni, and co-authored five books, including Is Anyone Out There? with astronomer Frank Drake.
The PBS science program NOVA produced a television documentary called Lost At Sea The Search for Longitude, which was based on Ms. Sobel's book. Granada Films of England created a dramatic version of the story, Longitude, starring Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon, which aired on A&E as a four-hour made-for-TV movie. A two-hour NOVA documentary based on Galileo's Daughter, called Galileo¹s Battle for the Heavens, first aired on public television in October 2002, and won an Emmy in the category of historical programming.
A 1964 graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, Sobel attended Antioch College and the City College of New York before receiving her Bachelor of Arts degree from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1969. She holds honorary doctor of letters degrees from the University of Bath, in England, and Middlebury College, Vermont, both awarded in 2002.
Sobel is the editor of the collection Best American Science Writing 2004. She lives with her husband and two children in East Hampton, New York
This biography was last updated on 03/24/2009.
A note about the biographies
We try to keep BookBrowse's biographies both up to date and accurate. However, with over 2000 lives to keep track of it's inevitable that
some won't be as current or as complete as we would like. So, please help us - if the information about a particular author is out of date,
inaccurate or simply very short, and you know of a more complete source, please let us know. Authors and those connected with authors:
If you wish to make changes to your bio, please send your complete biography as you would like it displayed so that we replace the old with the new, including your website URL if relevant.