Nicole Krauss

Nicole Krauss, born on August 18, 1974, in Manhattan, New York City, is an American author whose career has unfolded in contemporary American fiction from the early 2000s onward. She grew up on Long Island, New York, in a Jewish family with roots across Europe, Israel, London, and New York. Her mother was British Jewish, and her father was an American Jewish engineer and orthopedic surgeon who grew up partly in Israel. Her grandparents’ histories reached back to Germany, Ukraine, Hungary, Slonim in Belarus, Israel, and London, places that would later become central to her novel The History of Love, which she dedicated to her grandparents.

Krauss began writing as a teenager and first wrote and published mainly poetry. In 1987, when her father went to Basel, Switzerland, for a medical fellowship, she boarded at the International School of Geneva for Year 9. Memories from that period appear in her autobiographical short story “Switzerland,” published in 2020. She enrolled at Stanford University in 1992, where she met Joseph Brodsky that fall. Brodsky worked closely with her on her poetry for the next three years and introduced her to writers including Italo Calvino and Zbigniew Herbert. After Brodsky’s death, she made a BBC Radio 3 documentary about his work and traveled to St. Petersburg to stand in the “room and a half” where he grew up.

At Stanford, Krauss majored in English, graduated with honors, won several undergraduate prizes for poetry, and received the Dean’s Award for academic achievement. She also curated a reading series with Fiona Maazel at the Russian Samovar in New York City, a restaurant co-founded by Roman Kaplan, Brodsky, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. In 1996 she received a Marshall Scholarship and entered a master’s program at Somerville College, Oxford, where she wrote on the American artist Joseph Cornell. She then studied at the Courtauld Institute in London, earning a master’s degree in art history with a specialization in 17th-century Dutch art and a thesis on Rembrandt.

Krauss is best known for four novels: Man Walks into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010), and Forest Dark (2017), translated into 35 languages. Man Walks into a Room, a meditation on memory, personal history, solitude, and intimacy, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The History of Love was first excerpted in The New Yorker in 2004 and became a 2006 finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction, later winning the 2008 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for fiction. A film directed by Radu Mihăileanu was released in 2016. Great House was a 2010 National Book Award for Fiction finalist, was shortlisted for the 2011 Orange Prize, and won a 2011 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Her story collection To Be a Man appeared in 2020 and won the 2022 Wingate Literary Prize.

Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and Granta’s Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in The Best American Short Stories in 2003, 2008, and 2019. Her work often returns to Jewish history and identity, the limits of language and communication, loneliness, memory, and the formation of personal identity. Later novels move toward fragmentation, nonlinear structure, metafiction, and multiple narrators. In 2020 she was an Artist-in-Residence at Columbia University’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. In 2021 she received the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and its first Inspiration Award. Her words continue to matter because they join private memory to larger histories, asking how a person is made, lost, and known.