Paul Auster

The Times Literary Supplement has called Paul Auster “one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers,” and his work has been translated into more than 40 languages. He is the best-selling author of Winter Journal (2012), Sunset Park (2010), Invisible (2009), Man in the Dark (2008), Travels in the Scriptorium (2007), The Brooklyn Follies (2006), Oracle Night (2003), The Book of Illusions (2002), Timbuktu (1999), Mr. Vertigo (1994), Leviathan (1992), The Music of Chance (1990), Moon Palace (1989), In the Country of Last Things (1987), and the three novels known as The New York Trilogy: City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked Room (1986). His nonfiction works—collected in the Picador Paperback Original Collected Prose (2010)—include The Invention of Solitude (1998), Hand to Mouth (1997), The Red Notebook (1995), and The Art of Hunger (1992). He edited and introduced the national best seller I Thought My Father Was God: And Other True Tales from NPR’s National Story Project (2001) and edited The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry (1982). He also edited Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition (2006).

Auster wrote the screenplays for Smoke (which won an Independent Spirit Award for best screenplay and a Silver Bear from the Berlin International Film Festival), Blue in the Face, and Lulu on the Bridge (an official selection of the Cannes Film Festival), which he also directed. They are collected in Three Films (2003). He also wrote and directed The Inner Life of Martin Frost, which premiered at the opening of the 2007 New Directors/New Films Festival in New York City.
 
In 2006, Auster was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and won Spain’s most prestigious prize for literature—the Premio Principe de Asturias de las Letras. Among his other awards are the Premio Napoli (2010), the Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Prix Médicis for the best foreign novel published in France (1992), and the Morton Dauwen Zabel award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1990). He lives with his wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt, in Brooklyn, New York.