Rachel Kushner is the author of the internationally acclaimed novels The Mars Room (2018), The Flamethrowers (2013), and Telex from Cuba (2008), her collection of essays, The Hard Crowd (2021; all Scribner), and the short story collection The Strange Case of Rachel K (New Directions, 2015). Her books have been translated into twenty-six languages, including Portuguese. Her new novel, Creation Lake, will be published in in the United States and the UK in September of 2024.
She grew up in San Francisco and currently lives in Los Angeles. The daughter of Beatnik academics who instilled in her a poetic sensibility and intellectual erudition, Kushner is inspired by both American social life and European intellectual history to write stories that speak to a collective imaginary.
She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the Folio Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, and has won the Prix Médicis Étranger. She is on the Advisory Council for the Telluride Film Festival and was guest director at Telluride in 2015. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared primarily in The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine, she is a regular columnist for Harper’s Magazine.
© Photo by Gabby Laurent