Blake Nelson is an American author of adult and children's literature. He grew up in Portland, Oregon, and attended Wesleyan University and New York University. He lives in Hillsboro, Oregon, in the Portland metropolitan area. Nelson began his career writing short humor pieces for Details magazine in the mid-nineties. These articles, with titles like How to Date a Feminist and How to Live on $3600 a year, explored the slacker west coast lifestyle. His first novel Girl was excerpted in Sassy magazine in three successive issues. The mail Sassy received in response was key to the eventual publication of Girl. Nelson's novel Paranoid Park was made into a film of the same name by Gus Van Sant. The book won the prestigious Grinzane Cavour Prize in Italy. The film won a special 60th Anniversary prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. Nelson's newest novel The Prince of Venice Beach, is a finalist for the 2015 Edgar Award, and his novel Recovery Road has been adapted into a TV drama of the same name.
