Kai Bird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist. On July 21, 2023 Universal Studios released a major motion picture, Oppenheimer, based on American Prometheus, the biography Bird co-authored with the late Martin J. Sherwin. The screenplay was written by Christopher Nolan who is also the director of the film, featuring Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon, Robert Downey, Jr., Emily Blunt, Kenneth Branagh and a host of other actors. The film won seven Oscars.
Kai Bird’s current project is a biography of Roy Cohn, the notorious lawyer for Senator Joseph McCarthy, Donald Trump and the New York mafia. It will be published by Scribner.
His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, published on June 15, 2021 by Crown/Random House. The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (2014), was a New York Times best-seller. He chronicled his childhood in the Middle East in his memoir, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis–which was a Finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He is the acclaimed author of biographies of John J. McCloy, McGeorge Bundy, and William Bundy. He won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2006 for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (co-authored with Martin J. Sherwin). His work includes critical writings on the Vietnam War, Hiroshima, Nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict and the CIA.
Bird and Sherwin also won the National Books Critics Circle Award and the Duff Cooper Prize for History. In September 2016 Kai Bird was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Carleton College. He is an elected member of the prestigious Society of American Historians.
In January 2017 he was appointed Executive Director and Distinguished Lecturer of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, housed at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).
