Neale Donald Walsch

Neale Donald Walsch is the author of Conversations with God — one of the most widely read spiritual works of the modern era — and a man whose extraordinary dialogue began at the lowest point of an ordinary life. Born in Milwaukee in 1943 and raised Catholic by a family who encouraged his questions, he spent decades thriving professionally across radio, journalism, and public relations while quietly searching for a spirituality that made sense to him. Then life collapsed: a car accident left him with a broken neck, the recovery cost him his work, and he ended up homeless — living outside for a year, collecting cans, invisible. It was after clawing his way back, still starving for meaning, that one sleepless night in 1992 he did something millions have since recognised as their own suppressed impulse: he wrote God an angry letter, scrawling his desperate questions on a yellow legal pad. And then, he says, to his utter shock — answers began to come, arriving "out of nowhere," which the former newspaper reporter did the only thing his training allowed: he took them down, word for word.

Published in 1995, Conversations with God, Book 1: An Uncommon Dialogue became a publishing phenomenon, spending 137 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list; the dialogue grew into a nine-book series, seven New York Times bestsellers among them, translated into 37 languages and touching millions of lives. Walsch is careful about what he claims: the books are not channelled, he says, but inspired — a conversation available not to him alone but to everyone, all the time, if we're willing to listen. The God of his dialogue is without wrath or requirement, closer than breath, and endlessly affirming of the message Walsch calls the heart of it all: that the purpose of life is "to recreate yourself anew, in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever you held about Who You Are."

Now in his eighties and living in southern Oregon with his wife, the poet Em Claire, Walsch continues to write and teach with the energy of a man half his age — through the Conversations with God Foundation, his online platform CWGConnect, and worldwide online retreats and lecture programs. His story reached cinemas in the 2006 film Conversations with God, and his recent books — The God Solution, GodTalk, and 2026's Letters to a Young Seeker, his self-described departing thoughts from an elder — distil half a lifetime of dialogue into its essentials. For anyone who has ever shaken a fist at the sky and wondered if anyone was listening, Walsch offers the testimony of his whole remarkable life: someone is — and the conversation is already waiting for you.