Neale Donald Walsch

Neale Donald Walsch was born on 10 September 1943 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, into a Roman Catholic family. As a teenager he read broadly across religious texts — the Bible, the Rig Veda, the Upanishads — pursuing questions his schooling did not settle. He left the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee after two years and went into radio, working as a broadcaster and programme director from the age of nineteen. In the decades that followed he moved between newspaper reporting, public relations, and school communications, eventually founding his own marketing firm.

In the early 1990s a succession of losses — a fire, the end of his marriage, a car accident that fractured his neck — left him homeless and living in a tent outside Ashland, Oregon. One night he wrote a series of questions on a legal pad, addressed to God, and — drawing on his years as a reporter — transcribed the responses as they came to him. Those pages were picked up by a small Virginia press and published as Conversations with God. The book became an immediate bestseller and was translated into thirty-seven languages.

Walsch extended the exchange into a series of further volumes and founded the Conversations with God Foundation to develop educational programmes and community events around the material. He has remained active as a speaker and writer in the years since publication. The books are in circulation in thirty-seven languages; the Foundation continues to distribute the series and run programmes, keeping the work available to new readers decades after it first appeared.