Teju Cole is a photographer, novelist, essayist, and curator. His novel Open City won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a mong many other accolades. His essay collection, Known and Strange Things, was short-listed for both the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and the inaugural PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. His other highly acclaimed books include the novella Every Day is for the Thief, the multi-genre work Blind Spot , (shortlisted for the Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation First Photobook Award), the collaborative project Human Archipelago, the exhibition catalogue Go Down Moses and, most recently, the photobook Fernweh. His musical collaborations include performances with Vijay Iyer, Sylvie Courvoisier, and the Sonnambula early music ensemble, among others. From 2015-2019, he was Photography Critic of the New York Times Magazine. Cole was awarded the 2015 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction, a 2015 US Artists award, and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been a visiting critic at Yale School of Art, American University, and Columbia College. He currently lives in Cambridge, MA, where he is Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard.
