Nicole Krauss

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 immigrated to London. Her paternal grandparents were born in Hungary and Slonim, Belarus, met in Israel, and later immigrated 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 17th-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 a 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. A film of the book, directed by Radu Mihăileanu, was released in 2016.

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 had signed a $4 million deal with Harper Collins to publish her next two works: a novel, and also a book of short stories entitled How to Be a Man. The novel, which was originally to be called Late Wonder, is entitled Forest Dark and was published in 2017.

Personal life

In June 2004, Krauss married novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, and they had two children together, Sasha and Cy. Krauss and Foer separated in 2014. Krauss is in a relationship with the Israeli journalist and novelist Gon Ben Ari. Krauss lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Awards