Michael Silverblatt (born August 6, 1952) is a literary critic and American broadcaster who hosted Bookworm, a nationally syndicated radio program focusing on books and literature, from 1989 to 2022.
[1] He recorded over 1,600 interviews with authors and other literary figures, including Salman Rushdie, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, David Foster Wallace, William H. Gass, W. G. Sebald, and John Ashbery.
A lifelong voracious reader, Silverblatt was born in Queens, New York, into a Jewish family, attended SUNY Buffalo, majored in English, then entered postgraduate studies at Johns Hopkins University but dropped out.
[6] Silverblatt's Los Angeles Times review of William Gass's The Tunnel was blurbed on the cover of its paperback release: "The most beautiful, most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime.
[8] In 2018, Silverblatt was the inaugural recipient of the Deborah Pease Prize, awarded by A Public Space magazine for being a "figure who has advanced the art of literature".