About Roland

Roland Lazenby is an American author and educator who lives in Virginia. His best-known work is Michael Jordan, The Life, published in 2014 by Little, Brown. To date, it has been translated into more than 20 languages worldwide. It was a finalist for the Goodreads Readers’ Choice Awards in history and biography in 2014. Another of his popular titles is Showboat: The Life of Kobe Bryant, (2016), also published by Little, Brown and available in a dozen languages across the globe. In 2017, Showboat was a finalist for biography of the year in the British Cross Sports Book Awards. In October 2023, Lazenby’s newest biography, Magic: The Life of Earvin “Magic” Johnson will be published by Celadon Books.

Lazenby has written more than five dozen nonfiction books, mainly about basketball and American football. These include Fifty Years of the Final Four: Golden Moments of the NCAA basketball tournament (1987), co-authored with the late Billy Packer; The Lakers: A Basketball Journey (1993), Bull Run! The Story of the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls (1996), Blood on the Horns: The Long Strange Ride of Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls (1998), Mad Game, The NBA Education of Kobe Bryant (2000), Mindgames: Phil Jackson’s Long Strange Journey (2001); The Show: The Inside Story of the Spectacular Los Angeles Lakers in the Words of Those Who Lived It (2004), and Jerry West: The Life and Legend of a Basketball Icon (2010). Lazenby’s book Bull Run! was named Sports Book of the Year for 1997 by the Independent Publishers Association. His book, Michael Jordan. The Life, was named Sports Book of the Year 2015 in the Polish Sports Book Awards (Sportowa Książka Roku). He has also contributed articles to magazines and is a former award-winning newspaper reporter covering crime, prisons, the court system and government.

Lazenby studied at Virginia Military Institute and Hollins University, and has been a member of Virginia Tech’s Department of Communication and Radford University’s School of Communication. A group of students from his media writing class compiled the book April 16th: Virginia Tech Remembers (2007), an account of the Virginia Tech massacre. Lazenby served as editor. In 2005, Lazenby and Andrew Mager created Planet Blacksburg, a student organization focused on new media, journalism, and publishing.

This biography was revised from his Wikipedia page.