DARRYL PINCKNEY is an American novelist, playwright and essayist born on this date in Indianapolis, Indiana. He was educated at Columbia University in New York City.

Some of Pickney’s first professional works were theatre texts, plays developed in collaboration with director Robert Wilson. These included the produced works of  The Forest (1988) and Orlando (1989). He returned to theatre with Time Rocker (1995).

His first novel was High Cotton (1992), a semi-autobiographical novel about “growing up black and bourgeois” in 1960s America. His second novel was Black Deutschland (2016), about a young gay black man in Berlin in the late 1980s, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, Granta and The Nation. He frequently explores issues of racial and sexual identities, as expressed in literature.

In the 21st century, Pinckney has published two collections of essays on African-American literature. He has expressed his admiration for the writing of the long-running American CBS soap opera, As The World Turns.

His partner is English poet James Fenton; the couple has been together since 1989. Pinckney lives in New York City and Oxfordshire, England.