Michael Dirda is a longtime book columnist for The Washington Post and writes frequently for several magazines, including The New York Review of Books and the online Barnes & Noble Review. For more than ten years he has conducted an online book discussion for washingtonpost.com (see washingtonpost.com/readingroom) . As a senior editor for The Washington Post Book World, he oversaw The Post's monthly coverage of science fiction and fantasy from 1978 until 2003.

Dirda is the author of Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments (Indiana University Press, 2000; Norton paperback, 2003), An Open Book: Chapters from a Reader's Life (Norton 2003 Norton paperback, 2004 Recorded Books audio version, 2008 winner of the Ohioana Book Award, 2004), Bound to Please: Essays on Great Writers and Their Books (Norton 2004' Norton paperback, 2007; finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Current Affairs); Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life (Henry Holt, 2006; Henry Holt paperback, 2007); and Classics for Pleasure (Harcourt, 2007; Harcourt paperback, 2008). His books have been or are being translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, and Japanese. He has also written the monograph Caring for Your Books (Book-of-the-Month Club, 1991), the "The Big Read" Reader's Guide and Teacher's Guide for Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea (National Endowment for the Arts, 2008) and one published short story, "Dukedom Large Enough," (All-Hallows: The Journal of the Ghost Story Society, 2004). He was one of nine writers who contributed word and usage notes to the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus (Oxford University Press, 2004; second edition, 2008).

As a Book World editor, Dirda commissioned essays and reviews from virtually all the major figures in fantasy and science fiction. His own reviewing ranges widely over contemporary and classic literature, history, biography and cultural studies. He has written introductions to many books, some of which touch on f and sf: Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, Goethe, by George Santayana (Barnes and Noble Rediscovers, 2009), Homer's The Iliad and the Odyssey (Barnes & Noble Classics, 2008); The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, by Vladimir Nabokov (New Directions, 2008), The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, Vol. 3 (Night Shade Books, 2007), Dante: Poet of the Secular World, by Erich Auerbach (New York Review Books, 2007), The Nibelungenlied, translated by Burton Raffel (Yale University Press, 2006), The Manticore, by Robertson Davies (Penguin, 2006), The Collected Jorkens, Vol. 3 (Night Shade Books, 2005), The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Supernatural Tales of Arthur Conan Doyle (Ash-Tree Press, 2004), and Journey to the Center of the Earth, by Jules Verne (Signet paperback, 1984). Dirda also contributed substantial essays on the fantasy of Balzac, Merimee, Maupassant, and Jack Vance to E.F. Bleiler's Fantasy and Supernatural Fiction (Scribner's, 1990). He wrote the article on "The Continental Tradition" for The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural, edited by Jack Sullivan (Penguin, 1986). In its 2008 winter issue The American Scholar published "Ægyptology," his appreciation of John Crowley's four-volume Ægypt.

Over the years Dirda has interviewed or conducted public conversations with such authors as Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Chabon, William Gibson, Samuel R. Delany, Greg Bear, Gene Wolfe, and Gardner Dozois, as well as several mainstream writers who have occasionally dabbled in fantasy and science fiction, including Gore Vidal, John Updike, and Donald E. Westlake. In 2008 he was the judge for the Calvino Prize and was Critic Guest of Honor at Capclave.

Dirda graduated with Highest Honors in English from Oberlin College (1970), received a Fulbright grant to teach in Marseille (1970-71), and received an M.A. (1975) and Ph.D. (1977) from Cornell University in Comparative Literature (concentrating on medieval studies and European romanticism). He has taught at several colleges, most recently Oberlin College (2008) and Middlebury's Bread Loaf School of English (2006). He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1993 and was invested in the Baker Street Irregulars in 2002. He is also a member of The Ghost Story Society. He and Marian Peck Dirda, a prints and drawings conservator at the National Gallery of Art, have three sons: Christopher, Michael and Nathaniel