Lauren Elkin earned her PhD in English literature at the Université de Paris VII and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.  She specializes in women’s fiction, life-writing, urban studies, and photography, and her dissertation, “The Bend Back: Modernity, Sensation, Vision in Bowen, Rhys, Woolf, and Lehmann” won Honorable Mention for the Carolyn Heilbrun Dissertation Prize in Women’s Studies from the Center for the Study of Gender and Society at the Graduate Center. She graduated from Barnard College and holds masters degrees in French from the Sorbonne and in English from New York University.

She is the author of the novel Une Année à Venise (Editions Héloïse d’Ormesson), and is at work on her second novel, Scaffolding, set in Paris in 1972 and the present day. With Scott Esposito, she is the co-author of The End of Oulipo? An Attempt to Exhaust a Movement, published by Zer0 Books in early 2013.

Originally from New York, she moved to Paris in 2004.  Her essays on books and culture have appeared in many publications, including The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, Bookforum, The Daily Beast, The White Review, The New Inquiry, Nerve, Five Dials, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Daily, and The Millions. She is a contributing editor at The White Review.

She also works as a translator, notably for Boulevard Magenta, Princeton University Press, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and various art galleries in Paris.

photo: David Ignaszewski/Koboy

All text and most photographs copyright (c) Lauren Elkin, 2004-2012. All rights reserved.