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Sy Montgomery Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Sy Montgomery
Photo: Rosemary G. Conroy

Sy Montgomery

Sy Montgomery Biography

Sy's 20 books for both adults and children have garnered many honors. The Soul of an Octopus was a 2015 Finalist for the National Book Awards. The Good Good Pig, her memoir of life with her pig, Christopher Hogwood, is an international bestseller. She is the winner of the 2009 New England Independent Booksellers Association Nonfiction Award, the 2010 Children's Book Guild Nonfiction Award, the Henry Bergh Award for Nonfiction (given by the ASPCA for Humane Education) and dozens of other honors. Her work with the man-eating tigers, the subject of her book Spell Of The Tiger, was made into in a National Geographic television documentary she scripted and narrated.

She is a 1979 graduate of Syracuse University, a triple major with dual degrees in Magazine Journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and in French Language and Literature and in Psychology from the College of Arts and Sciences. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Keene State College in 2004, and an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Franklin Pierce University and also from Southern New Hampshire University in 2011.

Sy Montgomery's website

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Interview

Sy Montgomery discusses her book, The Good Good Pig, about Christopher Hogwood who came into her life as a piglet runt and ruled her home for the next fourteen years. She also discusses many aspects of her writing, her other books and her personal views on the environment, ecology and animal husbandry.

Question: For previous books you traveled to India to research man-eating tigers, bonded with the great apes of Africa, swam with the pink dolphins of the Amazon, and tracked the golden moon bear through Cambodia. For your latest book, The Good Good Pig, you stayed a lot closer to home. Tell us about it.

Sy Montgomery: For most of my books, I travel to jungles and cloud forests and deserts and swamps, and I get a lot of credit for not being killed in the process. I'm best known for writing about rare animals and foreign cultures in remote places. This book, though, is about the pig in our barnyard (though sometimes beyond—in his youth, Christopher Hogwood, like me, had the travel bug, only he didn't get quite as far). The setting isn't glamorous. Pigs aren't endangered or exotic. Yet Christopher Hogwood's adventures and personal charisma provided as much drama and delight as any expedition I have ever undertaken. It was he—and the interspecies family who gathered around him—who sustained me on all my voyages, and anchored me, for the first time in my life, to family and to home.

Q: Some people will look at this book and think it's about a pet pig. But Christopher Hogwood wasn't...

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Books by this Author

Books by Sy Montgomery at BookBrowse
The Good Good Pig jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Sy Montgomery but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Lynne Cox

    Lynne Cox

    Lynne Cox was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in Los Alamitos, California, where she still lives. She is the author of Swimming to Antarctica and Grayson. Her articles have appeard in The New Yorker... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    The Good Good Pig

    Try:
    Grayson
    by Lynne Cox

  • Mark Doty

    Mark Doty

    Mark Doty's books of poetry and nonfiction prose have been honored with such distinctions as the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, a ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    The Good Good Pig

    Try:
    Dog Years
    by Mark Doty

We recommend 5 similar authors

View all 5 Read-Alikes

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