Elif Batuman
Batuman, seated, shown from the waist up wearing red, looks to her right
Batuman in 2018
Born1977 (age 46–47)
New York City, US
Education
Occupations
  • Author
  • academic
  • journalist
Years active2006–present
Websiteelifbatuman.com

Elif Batuman (born 1977) is an American author, academic, and journalist.[1] She is the author of three books: a memoir, The Possessed, and the novels The Idiot, which was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Either/Or. Batuman is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

Early life

Elif Batuman was born in New York City to Turkish parents, and grew up in New Jersey. She graduated from Harvard College in 1999[2] and received her doctorate in comparative literature from Stanford University.[3] While attending graduate school, Batuman studied the Uzbek language in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Her dissertation, The Windmill and the Giant: Double-Entry Bookkeeping in the Novel,[4] is about the process of social research and solitary construction undertaken by novelists.[1]

Career

In February 2010, Batuman published her first book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, based on material she previously published in The New Yorker,[5] Harper's Magazine,[6] and N+1,[7][8] which details her experiences as a comparative literature graduate student at Stanford University. Reviewing the book for The New York Times, critic Dwight Garner praised the "winsome and infectious delight she feels in the presence of literary genius and beauty."[3]

Batuman’s novel The Idiot is partly based on her own experiences attending Harvard in the mid-1990s and teaching English in Hungary in the summer of 1996.[9] It was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[10]

Batuman was writer-in-residence at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey,[11] from 2010 to 2013. She now lives in New York.[12] In 2016, she met her partner; she writes that this relationship, her first non-heterosexual one,[13] "resulted in a series of changes to [her] views not just of gender but also of genre" as Batuman realized how influential film and narrative had been to her ideas about how women should behave.

Batuman's 2018 article in The New Yorker on Japan's rental family industry won the National Magazine Award. In 2021, the magazine returned the award after an investigation revealed that three subjects in the essay had made false statements to Batuman and the magazine's fact-checkers.[14]

Influences

Russian literature figures heavily in Batuman's work. Batuman says that her obsession with Russian literature began when she read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in high school.[9] Both The Possessed and The Idiot pay homage to Batuman's favorite Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky.[9]

Personal life

Batuman identifies as queer and stopped dating men at age 38.[15][16] In an interview, she discussed reading Adrienne Rich's essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence after beginning to date her current partner, a woman, after a lifetime of dating only men, and how it related to certain behaviors by her protagonist Selin.[17][18]

Bibliography

Novels

  • The Idiot, Penguin Press, 2017. ISBN 978-1-594-20561-3.
  • Either/Or, Penguin Press, 2022. ISBN 978-0525557593.

Short fiction

Stories[lower-alpha 1]
Title Year First published Reprinted/collected Notes
The repugnant conclusion 2022 Batuman, Elif (April 25 – May 2, 2022). "The repugnant conclusion". The New Yorker. 98 (10): 56–65.

Non-fiction

Interviews

———————

Notes
  1. ↑ Short stories unless otherwise noted.
  2. ↑ Online version is titled "Adventures in transcranial direct-current stimulation".
  3. ↑ Online version is titled "How to be a Stoic".

Awards

References

  1. 1 2 Kirsch, Adam (February 24, 2010). "A Comedian in the Academy". Slate. ISSN 1091-2339. Retrieved March 27, 2017.
  2. ↑ Aggarwal-Schifellite, Manisha (2022-06-22). "Novelist Elif Batuman returns to Harvard". Harvard Gazette. Retrieved 2023-06-16.
  3. 1 2 Garner, Dwight (February 17, 2010). "Tolstoy & Co. as Objects of Obsession". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved March 27, 2017.
  4. ↑ "I am a doctor". Archived from the original on 2012-03-14. Retrieved 2012-03-19.
  5. ↑ New Yorker articles
  6. ↑ "Elif Batuman | Harper's Magazine". Retrieved March 27, 2017.
  7. ↑ "Batuman/Elif". n+1. Retrieved March 27, 2017.
  8. ↑ 'The Meaning of Russia', Oxonian Review.
  9. 1 2 3 "Elif Batuman on Fictionalizing Her Life, and Learning to Fact Check". Literary Hub. 2017-03-21. Retrieved 2019-08-03.
  10. ↑ "2018 Pulitzer Prize Winners: Full List". The New York Times. 16 April 2018. Retrieved April 16, 2018.
  11. ↑ "Department of English Language and Comparative Literature - Elif Batuman". Koç University. Retrieved September 16, 2014.
  12. ↑ Bio of Elif Batuman, New Yorker contributors page.
  13. ↑ Batuman, Elif (January 31, 2022). "Céline Sciamma's Quest for a New, Feminist Grammar of Cinema". The New Yorker.
  14. ↑ Tracy, Mark (22 January 2021). "The New Yorker returns an award for its story on a Japanese rent-a-family business". The New York Times. Retrieved 25 January 2021.
  15. ↑ "Elif Batuman: 'The past few years have been about coming to terms with my queer identity'". inews.co.uk. 2022-05-21. Retrieved 2022-05-29.
  16. ↑ "Elif Batuman on the Need For Novels (And When Male Writers Describe Oral Sex)". Literary Hub. 2022-05-24. Retrieved 2022-05-29.
  17. ↑ "Why Elif Batuman's Been Thinking About "Compulsive Heterosexuality"". Literary Hub. 2022-05-26. Retrieved 2022-05-29.
  18. ↑ "Elif Batuman Read Marie Kondo's Book. Now Her Shelves Spark Joy". The New York Times. 2022-05-26. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2022-05-29.
  19. ↑ "The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Awards". www.ronajaffefoundation.org. Archived from the original on August 31, 2018. Retrieved March 27, 2017.
  20. ↑ "Elif Batuman | WHITING AWARDS". www.whiting.org. Retrieved March 27, 2017.
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