Martha Sherrill was born in Palo Alto, California — and later raised in Los Angeles, the daughter of an opera singer and a behavioral scientist and polling expert. She graduated from UCLA where she studied art history and film. After college, she worked at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. before landing a job at The Washington Post, initially as a fashion assistant in the Style Section, then as a staff writer covering art, culture and politics.

During her ten-year tenure at the Post, Sherrill became known for her penetrating studies of personality and society. She parlayed her knowledge of film into many memorable interviews with legendary directors and actors, including Jeanne Moreau, Clint Eastwood, Jodie Foster, Steven Soderbergh, and Peter O’Toole. Her award-winning essays range from a psychological exploration of political fanaticism, studies of homelessness and self-proclaimed happy people, to a three-part series on the young life of Hillary Clinton.

As a contributing editor at Esquire, she specialized in profiles of difficult interview subjects — Don Imus, Rudy Giuliani, Steve Martin — and wrote a poignant, candid personal essay about Peter Sherrill, her enigmatic father, (“My Father, The Bachelor.”)

In her four books, Sherrill travels between fiction and nonfiction, gravitating to stories of outliers, pioneers, and strong individuals. Her first book, The Buddha from Brooklyn (Random House), is the true story of religious devotion inside a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Poolesville, Maryland. My Last Movie Star, (Random House), uses primary sources and Hollywood memoirs to study the vagaries of fame. The Ruins of California (Penguin Press) is a critically-acclaimed coming-of-age novel set against the backdrop of the 1970s. She returned to nonfiction with Dog Man: An Uncommon Life on a Faraway Mountain (Penguin Press), the true story of a man and his wife in the snow country of Japan during World War II.

She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, writer, research scientist, and entrepreneur William Powers, and their son Will. In addition to private commissions — editing, collaborations, ghostwriting — Sherrill has written two original screenplays with Elsa Walsh and a film adaptation of Dog Man (“Akita”) with director John Williams. Her latest project, Refuge: The Cape Cod Cottage (Countryman Press, 2027) with photographer Tina Axelsson and Jura Koncius, is a study of the salty, spare, wind-blown cottages on the Cape peninsula and the ways they endure.