Awards:
In 2022, Laura van den Berg was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Fiction.
In 2021, Laura won a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Her first story collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, was a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, as was her second story collection, The Isle of Youth. That second collection also received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, given for “a work of fiction published during the preceding year that is a considerable literary achievement.” Stories from The Isle of Youth—“Opa-Locka” and “Antarctica”—appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and The Best American Mystery Stories.
Laura’s debut novel, Find Me, was longlisted for The Dylan Thomas Prize. In 2015, Laura was awarded The Bard Fiction Prize. She worked on her second novel, The Third Hotel, with the support of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. The Third Hotel was a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award and was named a best book of the year by over a dozen outlets. Her third collection of stories, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, was supported by a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship. The collection was longlisted for The Joyce Carol Oates Prize and was one of Time Magazine’s 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020.
Laura’s most recent novel, State of Paradise, was an IndieNext Pick, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and longlisted for The Joyce Carol Oates Prize. State of Paradise was one of Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2024, and named a Best Book of 2024 by Vanity Fair, NPR, ELLE, and Kirkus Reviews.
Recent Writing: I wrote about a dog walk gone weird in “Ghost Horses”; a cake gone very weird in “Cake”; books bans in Florida for Harper’s Bazaar; canine art appreciation for The Paris Review; a love letter to sweat for the New York Times Magazine.