Nicole Krauss

This article is about the author of The History of Love. For the author of The Nanny Diaries, see Nicola Kraus.

Nicole Krauss
File:Krauss, Nicole.jpg Nicole Krauss at the Miami Book Fair International 2011
Born	(1974-08-18) August 18, 1974 Manhattan, New York City, United States
Occupation	Novelist
Language	English
Nationality	American
Ethnicity	Jewish
Education	Stanford University; Oxford University; Courtauld Institute
Literary movement	Postmodernism
Notable works	Man Walks Into a Room (2002) The History of Love (2005) Great House (2010)
Notable awards	Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards 2011 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing 2008 Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger (France) 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Book of the Year 2002 Man Walks Into a Room Edward Lewis Wallant Award 2005
Spouse	Jonathan Safran Foer (m. 2004; div. 2014)
Children	2
Website
nicolekrauss.com

Nicole Krauss (born August 18, 1974) is an American author best known for her three novels Man Walks Into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005) and 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. 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.

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 emigrated to London. Her paternal grandparents were born in Hungary and Slonim, Belarus, met in Israel, and later emigrated 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 seventeenth-century Dutch art and writing a thesis on Rembrandt.

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 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.

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 signed a $4 million deal with Harper Collins to publish her next two works: the novel Late Wonder and a book of short stories entitled How to Be a Man.

Personal life

In June 2004, Krauss married novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, and the couple had two children together, Sasha and Cy. The couple separated in 2014. Krauss lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Bibliography

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Short stories

Title	Year	First published	Reprinted/collected in
Future emergencies	2002	Esquire (November 2002)
The last words on Earth	2004	The New Yorker (February 9, 2004)
My painter	2007	Granta 97 (Spring 2007)
From the desk of Daniel Varsky	2007	Harper's (June 2007)
The young painters	2010	The New Yorker 86/18 (June 28, 2010)
An arrangement of light	2012
Zusya on the roof	2013	The New Yorker 88/46 (February 4, 2013)
I Am Asleep but My Heart Is Awake	2014	The New Republic

Review columns

Date	Review article	Work(s) reviewed
2011

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
• Edward Lewis Wallant Award, 2005
• Los Angeles Times Book Prize Book of the Year (for Man Walks Into a Room), 2002
• Named "Best and Brightest" writer by Esquire, 2002

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

• The official website of Nicole Krauss
• "Becoming Domestic" – poem by Nicole Strauss
• We create who we are. An interview with Nicole Krauss Video by Louisiana Channel