Chandler Burr

Author and journalist

Author of the widely acclaimed book, The Emperor of Scent, Chandler Burr's work was immediately greeted with excitement and acclaim. Burr's scientific approach to the last mystery of the human senses is at once an understandable, informative and entertaining study of a gifted man and his place in the idiosyncratic science and business of smell. "A brilliant, feisty scientist at the center of a nasty, back-stabbing, utterly absorbing, cliff-hanging scramble for the Nobel Prize. The Emperor of Scent is a quirky, wonderful book." John Berendt (author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil).

"Those who say 'Homosexuality is not genetic' literally do not know what they are talking about. That statement, as far as we know today, is absolutely true; it is also absolutely meaningless. And very few people understand what it means politically nor why we feel what we do about sexual orientation and civil rights." - Chandler Burr

Chandler Burr is one of the most lucid and provocative writers on the biology of homosexuality and today's politics of sexual orientation and civil rights. His book, A Separate Creation: The Search for the Biological Origins of Sexual Orientation is widely regarded as one of the best works on the subject. "Booklist": "[Burr] sends us on a modern odyssey full of intellectual adventure and revelation. Enthralling - unputdownable! This may be both the gay studies book of the year and the popular science book of the year." Iconoclastic and unafraid of raising difficult issues.

Burr's third book, You or Someone Like You, is due out in the summer of 2009. You or Someone Like You is a novel narrated by the English wife of a Hollywood studio executive who finds herself leading a high-profile literary salon and enjoying for the first time in her life the effect of publicly proclaiming her controversial opinions about literature, religion, race and class.

As a journalist Burr has written and reported for The Christian Science Monitor, The Atlantic Monthly, The Lancet, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, California Lawyer, The Washington Monthly, The Weekly Standard, and The Los Angeles Times. Burr's new "Scent Strip" column with T: The New York Times Style Magazine makes him the world's first and only perfume and scent critic.

Burr was born in Chicago in 1963 and raised in Washington DC. He graduated from Principia College with a BA in Political Studies and received a Masters in International Economics and Japanese Studies from the John Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. He has studied and worked in Japan, Beijing, Paris, and Italy.