Naeem Murr (born March 1965) is a British-born novelist and short story writer of Lebanese descent. He is the author of three novels acclaimed for their dark portraiture and stark, original prose. He currently lives in Chicago with his wife, poet Averill Curdy .
Born in London, Murr moved to the United States in his early twenties and has been a writer-in-residence at numerous universities, including Western Michigan University, the University of Missouri, and Northwestern University and was a Stanford University Creative Writing Fellow. His first novel, The Boy, concerns a father's search for a strange orphan he adopted into his family who has fled to live in a slum as a prostitute. It was a New York Times Notable Book. A second novel, The Genius of the Sea, explores the fears and failures of a social-worker coming to terms with his life by talking with a man who now occupies his dead mother's apartment. His most recent book The Perfect Man was published in 2007 to critical acclaim. The novel was awarded The Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Best Book of Europe/South Asia, and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Set in the 1950s, The Perfect Man details the life of an unwanted boy sent first from India to London, and then to small-town Missouri, and the complex web of relationships he develops as he matures.
Murr has received many awards for his writing, including a Lambda Literary Award, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN Open Book Award and a Stegner Fellowship.
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American novelist and short story writer. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: The Virgin Suicides (1993), Middlesex (2002), and The Marriage Plot (2011). The Virgin Suicides served as the basis of a feature film, while Middlesex received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis.
Bernard Malamud was an American novelist and short story writer. Along with Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, and Philip Roth, he was one of the best known American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel The Fixer, about antisemitism in the Russian Empire, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Charles Richard Johnson is an African-American scholar and the author of novels, short stories, screen-and-teleplays, and essays, most often with a philosophical orientation. Johnson has directly addressed the issues of black life in America in novels such as Dreamer and Middle Passage. Johnson was born in 1948 in Evanston, Illinois, and spent most of his career at the University of Washington in Seattle.
David George Joseph Malouf is an Australian writer. He is widely recognized as one of Australia's greatest writers. He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2000, his 1993 novel Remembering Babylon won the International Dublin Literary Award in 1996, he won the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award in 2008, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2016, he received the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.
Alan James Hollinghurst is an English novelist, poet, short story writer and translator. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 1989 Somerset Maugham Award, the 1994 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 2004 Booker Prize.
Nuruddin Farah is a Somali novelist. He has also written plays both for stage and radio, as well as short stories and essays. Since leaving Somalia in the 1970s he has lived and taught in numerous countries, including the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Sudan, India, Uganda, Nigeria and South Africa.
Junot Díaz is a Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and fiction editor at Boston Review. He also serves on the board of advisers for Freedom University, a volunteer organization in Georgia that provides post-secondary instruction to undocumented immigrants. Central to Díaz's work is the immigrant experience, particularly the Latino immigrant experience.
László Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter known for difficult and demanding novels, often labeled postmodern, with dystopian and melancholic themes. Several of his works, notably his novels Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance, have been turned into feature films by Hungarian film director Béla Tarr.
Tabish Khairis an Indian English author and associate professor in the Department of English, University of Aarhus, Denmark. His books include Babu Fictions (2001), The Bus Stopped (2004), which was shortlisted for the Encore Award (UK) and The Thing About Thugs (2010), which has been shortlisted for a number of prizes, including the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the Man Asian Literary Prize. His poem Birds of North Europe won the First Prize in the Sixth The Poetry Society (India) Competition held in 1995.
Madeleine Thien is a Canadian short story writer and novelist. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature has considered her work as reflecting the increasingly trans-cultural nature of Canadian literature, exploring art, expression and politics inside Cambodia and China, as well as within diasporic Asian communities. Thien's critically acclaimed novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards for Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages.
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her Licence ès Lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.
Silas Dwane House is an American writer best known for his novels. He is also a music journalist, environmental activist, and columnist. House's fiction is known for its attention to the natural world, working class characters, and the plight of the rural place and rural people.
Richard Bausch is an American novelist and short story writer, and Professor in the Writing Program at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has published twelve novels, eight short story collections, and one volume of poetry and prose.
Ibrahim Nasrallah, the winner of the Arabic Booker Prize (2018), was born in 1954 to Palestinian parents who were evicted from their land in Palestine in 1948. He spent his childhood and youth in a refugee camp in Jordan, and began his career as a teacher in Saudi Arabia. After returning to Amman, he worked in the media and cultural sectors till 2006 when he dedicated his life to writing. To date, he has published 15 poetry collections, 21 novels, and several other books. In 1985, he started writing the Palestinian Comedy covering 250 years of modern Palestinian history in a series of novels in which each novel is an independent one; to date 12 novels have been published in the framework of this project. Five of his novels and a volume of poetry have been published in English, four works in Italian, and one novel in Danish, Turkish, and Persian.
Dinaw Mengestu is an Ethiopian-American novelist and writer. In addition to three novels, he has written for Rolling Stone on the war in Darfur, and for Jane Magazine on the conflict in northern Uganda. His writing has also appeared in Harper's, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. He is the Program Director of Written Arts at Bard College. In 2007 the National Book Foundation named him a "5 under 35" honoree. Since his first book was published in 2007, he has received numerous literary awards, and was selected as a MacArthur Fellow in 2012.
Porochista Khakpour is an Iranian American novelist and writer.
Bernardine Evaristo, MBE FRSL FRSA, FEA, is a British author of eight works of fiction. Her bestselling novel, Girl, Woman, Other, won the Booker Prize in 2019. It was also one of Barack Obama's 19 Favourite Books of 2019. Evaristo's writing also includes short fiction, drama, poetry, essays, literary criticism, and projects for stage and radio. Two of her books, The Emperor's Babe (2001) and Hello Mum (2010), have been adapted into BBC Radio 4 dramas. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and the vice-chair of the Royal Society of Literature.
Christopher Hope, FRSL is a South African novelist and poet who is known for his controversial works dealing with racism and politics in South Africa. His son is violinist Daniel Hope.
Peter Selgin is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, editor, and illustrator. Selgin is Associate Professor of English at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia. He is also a former affiliate faculty member at Antioch University's Low-Residency MFA Creative Writing Program in Los Angeles, California.
Neel Mukherjee is an India-born writer who lives in London and writes in English. He is the author of several critically acclaimed novels. He is also the brother of famous television anchor and editor Udayan Mukherjee
