Paul Auster

Biography

Described as “one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers,” Paul Auster’s work has been translated into more than 40 languages. He was the best-selling author of Winter Journal (2012), Sunset Park (2010), Invisible (2009), Man in the Dark (2008), Travels in the Scriptorium (2007), The Brooklyn Follies (2006), Oracle Night (2003), The Book of Illusions (2002), Timbuktu (1999), Mr. Vertigo (1994), Leviathan (1992), The Music of Chance (1990), Moon Palace (1989), In the Country of Last Things (1987), and the three novels known as The New York Trilogy: City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked Room (1986).

He has also authored nonfiction works and screenplays.

In 2006, Auster was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and won the Premio Principe de Asturias de las Letras, Spain’s most prestigious literature prize. He was also the recipient of the Premio Napoli (2010), the Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Prix Médicis for the best foreign novel published in France (1992), and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1990).

He lived with his wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt, in Brooklyn, New York, where he died in 2024.

(Courtesy of the Poetry Foundation)

What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?

In an essay about Jewish poet Charles Reznikoff, Auster writes that “The poems of an American Jew, or, if you will, of a hyphenated American, a Jewish-American, with two terms standing not so much on an equal footing as combining to form a third and wholly different term: the condition of being in two places at the same time, or, quite simply, the condition of being nowhere.”

Jewish poets Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès, and Charles Reznikoff were deeply influential to his writing and ” got [him] thinking about [his] own relationship to Judaism, and the relationship of Judaism to writing.”

Auster noted: “You could be a completely secular Jew and remain attached to history and even the philosophical groundwork of this faith.”

(Courtesy of Jake Marmer, Tablet Magazine)

Published Works

Poetry-

White Spaces: Selected Poems and Early Prose (New Directions Publishing, 2020) 

Collected Poems (Overlook Books / Faber & Faber, 2004)

Selected Poems (Faber & Faber,1998) 

Ground Work: Selected Poems and Essays 1970–1979 (Faber & Faber,1990) 

Disappearances: Selected Poems (Overlook Press,1988) — Overlook Press

Links to Sample Works

POETRY, “Spokes”

Readings in Contemporary Poetry, “White Nights” 

 

Languages of Publication(s) and Poets Translated

English, French

Subject Matter

Aging, Death, Grief & Elegy, Nature, Dreams.

Profile created by Rina Shamilov.