About
Lars Anderson is a senior instructor and New York Times best-selling author of 12 books, including “A Season in the Sun,” “Chasing the Bear,” “The Quarterback Whisperer,” “The Mannings,” “The Storm and the Tide,” “Carlisle Versus Army,” and “The All Americans.” Five of his books have been optioned for movies. His next book on Tom Brady, “Brady: An American Story and the Price of Greatness,” will be published by Macmillan in October 2026.
Impact Beyond the University
A 20-year veteran of Sports Illustrated, Anderson wrote over two-dozen cover stories for the magazine from 1994 to 2014. From 2015 to ‘17, Anderson was a senior writer at Bleacher Report and CNN.com, where he was the primary long-form writer for both sites. In 2017 his story, “The Death of a Teenage Quarterback,” won the APSE award (Associated Press Sport Editors) for the top feature in the nation among outlets with 175,000 readers or more. His work has been featured in “The Best American Sports Writing” series. In the spring of 2025, the University of Alabama named Anderson the recipient of the Clarence E. Cason Award in Nonfiction Writing, the school’s top literary honor given annually to an author who has made a significant contribution to journalism and the literature of the South. Anderson joined a list of 26 past winners, six of whom won the Pulitzer Prize.
In 2016 Anderson co-wrote with Armen Keteyian the Showtime documentary, “Running for His Life: The Lawrence Phillips Story.” The 90-minute film was based on two of Anderson’s stories for Bleacher Report and an SI cover story he wrote on Phillips. The film garnered more viewers than any sports documentary in the history of Showtime.
A Passion for Long-Form Sports Storytelling
Currently on the faculty of the University of Alabama as a senior instructor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media, Anderson specializes in teaching sports writing and journalism ethics. He is also the co-host of the “The Big Noon Sports Radio Show” that airs Monday through Friday on radio stations across Alabama. Before he launched “Big Noon Sports” in early November 2022, he spent four years as the co-host of “The Jay Barker Radio Show with Lars Anderson” that was on stations throughout the South.
A native of Lincoln, Nebraska, Anderson is a graduate of St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, and he earned his master’s degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama.