MARGALIT FOX is a senior writer at The New York Times. As a member of the paper’s celebrated Obituary News department, she has written the Page One send-offs of some of the best-known cultural figures of our era, including the pioneering feminist Betty Friedan, the writer Maya Angelou, and the children’s author Maurice Sendak. For her work at the Times, she received Front Page Awards from the Newswomen’s Club of New York in 2011 and 2015.
Fox is also the author of Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind (Simon & Schuster, 2007) and The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code (Ecco, 2013). That book, which chronicles the decipherment of the mysterious Bronze Age script known as Linear B, was selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of the year and received the 2014 William Saroyan Prize for International Writing.
Her work is prominently featured in The Sense of Style (2014), the bestselling guide to writing well by Steven Pinker. In 2016, the Poynter Institute named Fox one of the six best writers in the history of The New York Times.
Fox holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in linguistics from Stony Brook University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, the writer and critic George Robinson.
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Twitter: @margalitfox