Surviving as a Pirate Hostage

Michael Scott Moore is a journalist and a novelist, author of a comic novel set in a fictional California surf town, Too Much of Nothing, as well as a travel book about surfing, Sweetness and Blood, which was named a best book of 2010 by The Economist and Popmatters. He covered the 2011 trial of ten Somali pirates in Europe for Spiegel Online, then traveled to Somalia in early 2012 to research a book. He was kidnapped and held hostage for two and a half years.

He grew up in Redondo Beach and graduated from Mira Costa High School. His memoir about Somalia is due out from HarperCollins in mid-2018.

He’s covered the European migration crisis for Businessweek, and politics, travel, and literature for The Atlantic, Der Spiegel, The New Republic, Pacific Standard, The New York Times, The L.A. Times, The Daily Beast, and The L.A. Review of Books. He has received fellowships or grants from Fulbright, The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and the Carey Institute for the Global Good.

Michael will talk about what it took to survive as a pirate hostage, centered on classical Stoicism.