Elif Batuman (born in 1977,[1] in New York City) is an American author, academic, and journalist. She won a 2010 Whiting Writers' Award.
Contents |
Born in New York to Turkish parents, she grew up in New Jersey. She graduated from Harvard College, and received her doctorate in comparative literature from Stanford University, where she taught.[2] Batuman is currently the writer-in-residence at Koç University. While in graduate school, Batuman studied the Uzbek language in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Her dissertation, titled "The Windmill and the Giant: Double-Entry Bookkeeping in the Novel," is about the process of social research and solitary construction undertaken by novelists.[1] In 2007, she was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.[3]
In February, 2010, she published her first book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, based on material previously published in The New Yorker,[4] Harper's Magazine,[5] and n+1,[6][7] which details her experiences as a graduate student. Her writing has been described as "almost helplessly epigrammatical."[2]
She currently resides in Istabul, Turkey, where she is writer in resident for a local university.[8]