Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss at the Miami Book Fair International 2011
Born	(1974-08-18) August 18, 1974 (age 37) Manhattan, New York City, United States
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	American
Notable work(s)	Man Walks Into a Room (2002) The History of Love (2005) Great House (2010)
Notable award(s)	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(s)	Jonathan Safran Foer (June 2004–present)
Children	Two children
nicolekrauss.com

Nicole Krauss (born August 18, 1974)^[1] is an American author best known for her novels Man Walks Into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005) and, most recently, 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.^[2] In 2010, she was selected as one of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" writers to watch.^[1]

Early life[link]

Krauss, who grew up on Long Island,^[3][4] was born in Manhattan, New York City^[1] to an English mother and an American father who grew up partly in Israel.^[5] 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.^[6] 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,^[7][8] wrote and published mainly poetry^[8][9] until she began her first novel in 2001.

Krauss enrolled in Stanford University in 1992, and that fall she met Joseph Brodsky^[10] 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.^[11] 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.^[12]

In 1996 Krauss was awarded a Marshall Scholarship and enrolled in a master's program at Oxford University^[2] 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,^[2] where she received a master's in art history, specializing in seventeenth-century Dutch art and writing a thesis on Rembrandt.

Career[link]

In 2002, Krauss published her acclaimed^[13][14] 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.^[15]

In spring 2007 Krauss was Holtzbrinck Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy in Berlin.^[16]

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.^[17]

Personal life[link]

In June 2004, Krauss married novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. They live in Park Slope in Brooklyn, New York, and have two children.^[18]

Bibliography[link]

Novels[link]

• Great House (2010)
• The History of Love (2005)
• Man Walks Into a Room (2002)

Short stories[link]

• "The Young Painters", The New Yorker, 2010
• "From the Desk of Daniel Varsky", Harper's, 2007 (included in Best American Short Stories 2008)
• "My Painter", Best of Young American Novelists 2, Granta 97, May 10 2007, ISBN 9-780903141-92-5
• "The Last Words on Earth", The New Yorker, 2004
• "Future Emergencies", Esquire, 2002 (included in Best American Short Stories 2003)

Essays[link]

• Preface to Best European Nonfiction 2012, Dalkey Archive, 2011
• "Krauss reviews Antwerp by Roberto Bolano", The Guardian, 2011
• "Writers Block", The New Republic, 2011
• "Philip Guston: The First Painter After The Last", Modern Painters, 2003

Awards[link]

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

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• 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[link]

• The official website of Nicole Krauss
• "Becoming Domestic" - poem by Nicole Strauss