Laura van den Berg was born and raised in Florida. She is the author of six works of fiction, including The Third Hotel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award; I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), which was one of Time Magazine’s 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020; and, most recently, State of Paradise (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has twice been shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.Her next novel, Ring of Night, is forthcoming from FSG. She is a Senior Lecturer on Fiction at Harvard University and is based in the Hudson Valley, with her husband, the writer Paul Yoon, and their dog, Oscar. Laura boxes competitively in the amateurs and can usually be found at the gym, training for her next fight. She writes a newsletter about boxing and writing called FIGHT WEEK.
Photo credit is © Lucy Bohnsack 2023
Laura is also the author of two previous story collections, The Isle of Youth (FSG, 2013) and What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, 2009), and the novel Find Me (FSG, 2015). Her other honors include the Bard Fiction Prize, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, and the Jeannette Haien Ballard Writer’s Prize, a $25,000 annual prize given to “a young writer of proven excellence in poetry or prose.”
Laura’s stories have appeared in The Paris Review, The Sewanee Review, BOMB, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, Freeman’s, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, and One Story, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her criticism and essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, BOMB, the New York Times Magazine, and Harper’s Bazaar.
Photo credit is © Marco Giugliarelli for Civitella Ranieri Foundation, 2018.
