Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (Lagnado)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 1, 1958
• Where—Cairo, Egypt
• Education—B.A., Vassar College
• Awards—Sami Rohr Prize
• Currently—New York City, and Sag Harbor, New York


Lucette Lagnado is an Egyptian-born American journalist and memoirist. She is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Lagnado attended P.S. 205 in Bensonhurst Brooklyn, New York City, and is a graduate of Vassar College. She is married to journalist Douglas Feiden, and lives in New York City and Sag Harbor on the East End of Long Island.

She was born to a Jewish family in Cairo, Egypt, and wrote a prize-winning memoir about her childhood, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World. The book was awarded the 2008 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

In September, 2011, she published a companion volume to Sharkskin that tells the story of Lagnado's mother, Edith. The Arrogant Years: One Girl's Search for Her Lost Youth, from Cairo to Brooklyn juxtaposes the author's own coming of age in New York with that of her mother in Cairo, revealing how the choices she made meant both a liberation from Old World traditions and the loss of a comforting and familiar community. Described by the publisher as an epic family saga of faith and fragility, the book was published in 2011. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/27/2014.)