Nicole Krauss (born August 18, 1974) is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks Into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017). Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003 and Best American Short Stories 2008. Her novels have been translated into 35 languages. In 2010, she was selected as one of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" writers to watch. In 2011, Nicole Krauss won an award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for Great House.
Video Nicole Krauss
Early life
Krauss, who grew up on Long Island, was born in Manhattan, New York City to a British Jewish mother and an American Jewish father, an engineer and orthopedic surgeon who grew up partly in Israel. Krauss's maternal grandparents were born in Germany and Ukraine and later immigrated to London. Her paternal grandparents were born in Hungary and Slonim, Belarus, met in Israel, and later immigrated to New York. Many of these places are central to Krauss's 2005 novel, The History of Love, and the book is dedicated to her grandparents.
Krauss, who started writing when she was a teenager, wrote and published mainly poetry until she began her first novel in 2001.
Krauss enrolled in Stanford University in 1992, and that fall she met Joseph Brodsky who worked closely with her on her poetry over the next three years. He also introduced her to the work of writers such as Italo Calvino and Zbigniew Herbert. In 1999, three years after Brodsky died, Krauss produced a documentary about his work for BBC Radio 3. She traveled to St. Petersburg where she stood in the "room and a half" where he grew up, made famous by his essay of that title. Krauss majored in English and graduated with honors, winning several undergraduate prizes for her poetry as well as the Dean's Award for academic achievement. She also curated a reading series with Fiona Maazel at the Russian Samovar, a restaurant in New York City co-founded by Roman Kaplan, Brodsky and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
In 1996 Krauss was awarded a Marshall Scholarship and enrolled in a master's program at Oxford University where she wrote a thesis on the American artist Joseph Cornell. During the second year of her scholarship she attended the Courtauld Institute in London, where she received a master's in art history, specializing in 17th-century Dutch art and writing a thesis on Rembrandt.
Maps Nicole Krauss
Career
In 2002, Krauss published her acclaimed first novel, Man Walks Into a Room. A meditation on memory and personal history, solitude and intimacy, the novel won praise from Susan Sontag and was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Award. The movie rights to the novel were optioned by Richard Gere.
Her second novel, The History of Love, was first published as an excerpt in The New Yorker in 2004. The novel, published in the United States by W.W. Norton, weaves together the stories of Leo Gursky, an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor from Slonim, the young Alma Singer who is coping with the death of her father, and the story of a lost manuscript also called The History of Love. A film of the book, directed by Radu Mih?ileanu, was released in 2016.
In spring 2007, Krauss was Holtzbrinck Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy in Berlin.
Her third novel, Great House, connects the stories of four characters to a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away. It was named a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award for Fiction and was short-listed for the Orange Prize 2011 and also won an Award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards in 2011.
In 2015 it was reported that she had signed a $4 million deal with Harper Collins to publish her next two works: a novel, and also a book of short stories entitled How to Be a Man. The novel, which was originally to be called Late Wonder, is entitled Forest Dark and was published in 2017.
Personal life
In June 2004, Krauss married novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, and they had two children together, Sasha and Cy. Krauss and Foer separated in 2014. Krauss lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Bibliography
Novels
- Krauss, Nicole (2002). Man Walks Into a Room. Doubleday.
- -- (2005). The History of Love: a novel. W. W. Norton.
- -- (2010). Great House. W. W. Norton.
- -- (2017). Forest Dark. HarperCollins.
Short stories
Essays and reporting
- Krauss, Nicole (Winter 2003). "Philip Guston : the first painter after the last" (PDF). Modern Painters: 86-91. Retrieved January 28, 2015.
- -- (April 18, 2005). "My summer in Poland". Are We There Yet?. The New Yorker. Retrieved January 28, 2015.
- -- (2011). "Preface". In Hemon, Aleksandar. Best European Fiction 2012. Dalkey Archive Press. ISBN 9781564786807.
- -- (March 24, 2011). "Writer's block: the end of bookstores". The New Republic. Retrieved January 28, 2015.
Review columns
Awards
- Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winner, 2011
- Orange Prize shortlist, 2011
- National Book Award finalist, 2010
- William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, 2008
- Granta's Best American Novelists under 40, 2007
- Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize) (France), 2006
- Medicis Prize shortlist (France), 2006
- Femina Prize shortlist (France), 2006
- Orange Prize shortlist (U.K.), 2006
- Edward Lewis Wallant Award, 2005
- Named "Best and Brightest" writer by Esquire, 2002
Notes and references
Further reading
- "Nicole Krauss: By the Book", The New York Times, September 7, 2017
- "Nicole Krauss - 'It's limiting to describe myself as a Jewish writer'", interview with Anne Joseph in The Jewish Chronicle, September 7, 2017
- "We create who we are. An interview with Nicole Krauss", video interview by Marc-Christoph Wagner on Louisiana Channel, 2012
- "Q&A With Nicole Krauss, Author of Great House and The History of Love", interview with Elana Estrin in Huffington Post, September 15, 2011
- Alexandra Schwartz: "Empty Rooms: On Nicole Krauss", in The Nation, January 31, 2011
- "Author Nicole Krauss discusses her latest book Great House: A Novel", interview by Charlie Rose, video: December 7, 2010
- Jennie Rothenburg Gritz: "Nicole Krauss on Fame, Loss, and Writing About Holocaust Survivors", in The Atlantic, October 21, 2010
- "Critically acclaimed young novelist Nicole Krauss shares her latest work, Great House", interview by Charlie Rose, video: October 12, 2010
External links
- Official website
Source of article : Wikipedia
0 Comments