About me
Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including the NYT bestsellers Vampires in the Lemon Grove and Swamplandia!, one of the NYT’s ten best books of the year and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her latest novel, The Antidote, was the winner of the 2026 Pacific Northwest Book Awards and a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award and the 2026 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the grateful recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the NYPL’s Young Lions Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” award, and was selected for Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list (She is now decisively over 40). With Ellis Ludwig-Leone and Troy Schumacher, she co-created The Night Falls, one of the NYT’s Best Dance Performances of 2023. She serves on the board of Street Books. Born and raised in Miami, FL, she is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Stanford University and lives in Berkeley, CA with her husband, son, and daughter.
