Laura van den Berg

Laura van den Berg was born and raised in Florida. She is the author of two collections of stories, The Isle of Youth (FSG, 2013) and What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, 2009), and the novels Find Me (FSG, 2015) and The Third Hotel (FSG, 2018).

The Third Hotel was a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award. The book was also an IndieNext Pick, a Powell’s Books Indispensable Pick, and named a “best book of 2018” by over a dozen publications, including The Boston Globe.

Laura’s honors include the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, 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.” Her debut collection was selected for the Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” program, and she has twice been shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. The Isle of Youth was named a “Best Book of 2013” by over a dozen outlets, including NPR, The Boston Globe, and O, The Oprah Magazine. Find Me was selected as a “Best Book of 2015” by NPR and longlisted for the 2016 International Dylan Thomas Prize.

Her stories have appeared in The Paris 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, O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, and Vogue.com.

Laura has taught creative writing in the M.F.A. Program at Columbia University, the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Tin House Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband, the writer Paul Yoon, and their dog, Oscar. She is a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard University. Her next book, a collection of stories titled I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, will be published by FSG in 2020.