Who is Harry's celebrated ghostwriter, JR Moehringer?

JR Moehringer, the writer behind Prince Harry's new memoir

He was a winner of America's most prestigious journalism prize, and his life story was turned into a movie starring Ben Affleck.

He knows George Clooney, who reportedly introduced him to the subject of his latest work.

Yet JR Moehringer is not among the rich, royal and famous who make appearances in Spare, Prince Harry's memoir.

Instead, Mr Moehringer helped him write it.

It is not his first foray into the world of celebrity memoirs - he ghostwrote Andre Agassi's Open, and collaborated with Nike co-founder Phil Knight for his autobiography, Shoe Dog.

His services - reported by Page Six in 2021 to have been $1m (£820,000) to ghostwrite Spare - come with white-glove, all-immersive service.

When he worked with Mr Agassi on Open, Mr Moehringer moved to Las Vegas so the two could spend 250 hours together. To get inside Mr Agassi's psyche, he read the work of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, he told the New York Times.

"Freud was a big help," he recalled. "Especially 'Civilization and Its Discontents' and the idea of a death instinct. One of the pillars of Andre's personality was his self-destructiveness, and I realised that I had been pushing away the idea that this could be an organic part of his nature."

But some of Mr Moehringer's insights into Mr Agassi and, now, the prince - both complicated men with vexed parental relationships - may have arisen from his own complicated relationship with his father.

Mr Moehringer's own 2005 autobiography on the subject, The Tender Bar, discussed his childhood in Long Island being raised by a single mother, and finding a father figure in his Uncle Charlie and a pack of barflies at the local watering hole.

His own father - a rock'n'roll DJ in the early days of FM radio - had abandoned the family.

"The radio provided this spotty access to him. So I was always trying to dial him in," he told NPR's Terry Gross. "I didn't understand that he had a certain shift every day. So I'd sit out on the stoop. And I had this transistor radio. And I was turning the dial excruciatingly slowly, trying to find his voice."

A 2021 film version of The Tender Bar produced by Mr Clooney cast Mr Affleck as the aforementioned Uncle Charlie.

Before turning to book forms, Mr Moehringer attended Yale, and then worked at the New York Times as a news assistant. That was followed by stints in Colorado and the Los Angeles Times, in 1994. In 2000, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his feature Crossing Over, about the tensions that arose when a ferry opened up in a small segregated community in Alabama.

In addition to the Tender Bar and his ghostwriting, he has also written a novel, Sutton, about bank robber Willie Sutton.

The best ghostwriters do not just write well, they are able to embody their subjects, without ever sounding like a stand-up doing an impression.

"He's the pinnacle," book agent Madeleine Morel told the Observer. "I'm sure everybody aspires to be him. He's such a brilliant writer. It's very hard to ghostwrite a book and at some level never have it sound like it was written by somebody else."

But being among the creme de la creme of ghostwriters often means deliberately flying under the radar.

Around the release of Mr Agassi's Open in 2009, he told the New York Times: "The midwife doesn't go home with the baby."