Laura van den Berg

Laura van den Berg’s most recent novel, The Third Hotel, was an ABA IndieNext Pick, named a best book of 2018 by over a dozen outlets, and a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award. She is also the author of the novel Find Me, longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and two story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection, and The Isle of Youth. Both collections were finalists for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her honors include the Bard Fiction Prize, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an O. Henry Award, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. The title story of her debut collection is currently being adapted for the screen by writer/producer Jenny Halper and director Claire McCarthy, with Naomi Watts and Sophie Lillis attached to star. Laura’s short fiction has recently appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, BOMB, McSweeney’s, The Best American Short Stories, and the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA, where she is a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard. This spring, she will be visiting faculty at the Michener Center for Writers. Laura’s next story collection, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, is forthcoming from FSG in June 2020.