- Nicole Krauss
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This article is about the author of The History of Love. For the author of The Nanny Diaries, see Nicola Kraus.
Nicole Krauss (born August 18, 1974)[1] is an American author best known for her novels Man Walks Into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005) and, most recently, Great House (2010). 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.[2] In 2010, she was selected as one of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" writers to watch.[1]
Contents
Early life
Krauss, who grew up on Long Island,[3] was born in Manhattan, New York City[1] to an English mother and an American father who grew up partly in Israel.[4] Krauss's maternal grandparents were born in Germany and Ukraine and later emigrated to London. Her paternal grandparents were born in Hungary and Slonim, Belarus, met in Israel, and later emigrated to New York.[5] 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,[6][7] wrote and published mainly poetry[7][8] until she began her first novel in 2002.
Krauss enrolled in Stanford University in 1992, and that fall she met Joseph Brodsky[9] 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.[10] 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.[11]
In 1996 Krauss was awarded a Marshall Scholarship and enrolled in a masters program at Oxford University[2] 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,[2] where she received a masters in art history, specializing in seventeenth-century Dutch art and writing a thesis on Rembrandt.
Career
In 2002, Krauss published her acclaimed[12][13] 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 the 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. The novel was an international bestseller and won numerous awards. The book was optioned by Warner Brothers and is set to be directed by Alfonso Cuarón.[14]
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.[15]
Personal life
In June 2004, Krauss married novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. They live in Park Slope in Brooklyn, New York, and have two children.[16]
Bibliography
Books
- Great House (2010)
- The History of Love (2005)
- Man Walks Into a Room (2002)
Short stories
- "The Young Painters", The New Yorker, 2010
- "From the Desk of Daniel Varsky", Harper's, 2007 (included in Best American Short Stories 2008)
- "My Painter", Granta, 2007
- "The Last Words on Earth", The New Yorker, 2004
- "Future Emergencies", Esquire, 2002 (included in Best American Short Stories 2003)
Essays
- Preface to Best European Nonfiction 2012, Dalkey Archive, 2011
- "Krauss reviews Antwerp by Roberto Bolano", The Guardian, 2011
- "Writers Block", The New Republic, 2011
- "Philip Guston: The First Painter After The Last", Modern Painters, 2003
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 Etranger (Best Foreign Book Prize) (France), 2006
- Medicis Prize shortlist (France), 2006
- Femina Prize shortlist (France), 2006
- Orange Prize shortlist (U.K.), 2006
- Los Angeles Times Book Prize Book of the Year (for Man Walks Into a Room), 2002
- Named "Best and Brightest" writer by Esquire, 2002
References
- ^ a b c Mark Flanagan. "Nicole Krauss". about.com Contemporary Literature. http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/authorprofiles/p/Nicole-Krauss.htm. Retrieved May 11, 2011.
- ^ a b c "Nicole Krauss". BBC Radio 3, BBC website. March 27, 2011. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zt5t4. Retrieved April 28, 2011.
- ^ Ann Marsh (September/October, 2005). "The Emergence of Nicole Krauss". Stanford Magazine, Stanford Alumni Association. http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2005/sepoct/features/krauss.html. Retrieved May 11, 2011.
- ^ Hannah Brown (May 14, 2010). "The history of Nicole Krauss". Jerusalem Post. http://www.jpost.com/ArtsAndCulture/Books/Article.aspx?id=175471. Retrieved April 27, 2011.
- ^ Jessica Teisch (Nov-Dec 2010). "Nicole Krauss". Bookmarks Magazine. http://www.bookmarksmagazine.com/nicole-krauss/jessica-teisch. Retrieved April 28, 2011.
- ^ Bryan Cheyette (March 11, 2011). "Great House By Nicole Krauss". The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/great-house-by-nicole-krauss-2238065.html. Retrieved April 27, 2011.
- ^ a b "A conversation with Nicole Krauss". Bold Type (Random House). May, 2002. http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0502/krauss/interview.html. Retrieved April 28, 2011.
- ^ Boris Katchka (May 21, 2005). "Bio Hazards". New York Books. http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/books/reviews/11916/. Retrieved April 27, 2011.
- ^ Gaby Wood (May 15, 2005). "Have a heart". The Observer. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/may/15/fiction.features3. Retrieved April 27, 2011.
- ^ Nicole Krauss (November 7, 1999). "Future Tense". Los Angeles Times. http://articles.latimes.com/1999/nov/07/books/bk-30801. Retrieved April 28, 2011.
- ^ Leon Neyfakh (December 20, 2007). "Farrar, Straus and Giroux To Host Monthly Reading Series at Russian Samovar". New York Observer. http://www.observer.com/2007/farrar-straus-and-giroux-host-monthly-reading-series-russian-samovar. Retrieved April 26, 2011.
- ^ Joy Press (May 21, 2002). Living in Oblivion,Village Voice, Retrieved May 14, 2011. "Krauss is a fluent, thoughtful writer who takes on a lot of complex ideas and rarely loses her grip on them... Man Walks Into a Room is a chilling addition to the annals of amnesia lit. It's a novel that grapples with the ephemeral experience of being human and the realization that we create a lifetime of memories that vanish when we do".
- ^ Gillian Flynn (August 2, 2002). "Man Walks Into a Room". ew.com Entertainment Weekly. http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,331430,00.html. Retrieved July 16, 2011.
- ^ Michael Fleming; Cathy Dunkley (January 20, 2005). "WB buys book of 'Love'". Variety. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117916664.html?categoryid=1238&cs=1. Retrieved June 3, 2007.
- ^ "Orange Prize for Fiction announces 2011 shortlist". Orange. April 12, 2011. http://www.orangeprize.co.uk/prize.html. Retrieved April 26, 2011.
- ^ "Interview with Jonathan Safran Foer", The Young and Hungry, May 3, 2009. Retrieved on April 26, 2011.
Further reading
- Q&A With Nicole Krauss, Author of Great House and The History of Love. In: Huffington Post, September 15, 2011
- Alexandra Schwartz: Empty Rooms: On Nicole Krauss. In: The Nation, January 31, 2011
- Nicole Krauss on Fame, Loss, and Writing About Holocaust Survivors. In: The Atlantic, October 21, 2010
- Author Nicole Krauss discusses her latest book 'Great House: A Novel" – interview by Charlie Rose (December 7, 2010)
External links
Categories:- 21st-century novelists
- American novelists
- American people of Belarusian descent
- American people of English descent
- American people of German descent
- American people of Hungarian descent
- American people of Ukrainian descent
- American short story writers
- 1974 births
- Living people
- Alumni of the Courtauld Institute of Art
- Marshall Scholars
- Stanford University alumni
- Jewish American novelists
- People from Brooklyn
- Writers from New York
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