Adam Higginbotham

Adam Higginbotham is a British journalist and author who specializes in narrative nonfiction about technology, disaster, and American culture. He has been a contributing writer for Wired, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and GQ, among other publications. Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster (2019) was a New York Times bestseller and won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and numerous other prizes. Drawing on a decade of research including previously classified Soviet documents and dozens of interviews with survivors, it remains the most comprehensive account of the 1986 disaster in English. Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space (2024) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction—a feat that made Higginbotham one of only a small number of authors to win the Carnegie Medal twice. The book examines the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion with the same meticulous archival and interview research as his Chernobyl book. Higginbotham was educated at Oxford University and has lived in New York City for many years. His work is known for its extraordinary narrative pacing, deep archival research, and ability to humanize complex technical subjects.