Daniel Tammet

Diagnoses

Passions

Vocation

Notable

Traits

Family

English essayist, novelist, poet, translator, and autistic savant. His 2006 memoir, Born on a Blue Day, about his life with Asperger syndrome and savant syndrome, was named a "Best Book for Young Adults" in 2008 by the American Library Association Young Adult Library Services magazine. His second book, Embracing the Wide Sky, was one of France's best-selling books of 2009. His third book, Thinking in Numbers, was published in 2012. Mishenka, his first novel, was published in France and Quebec in 2016. His books have been published in over 20 languages. He was elected in 2012 to serve as a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. At age twenty-five, he was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome by Simon Baron-Cohen of the University of Cambridge Autism Research Centre. He is one of fewer than a hundred "prodigious savants" according to Darold Treffert, the world's leading researcher in the study of savant syndrome. He was the subject of a documentary film, Extraordinary People: The Boy with the Incredible Brain, first broadcast on the British television station Channel 4 on 23 May 2005. Tammet met software engineer Neil Mitchell in 2000. They lived in Kent, England, where they had a quiet life at home with their cats, preparing meals from their garden. He and Mitchell operated the online e-learning company Optimnem, where they created and published language courses. Tammet now lives in Paris, France, with his husband Jérôme Tabet, a photographer whom he met while promoting his autobiography. Link to Wikipedia biography