Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer is an American writer.

He was born in 1977 and grew up in Washington, D.C.

He was educated at Princeton University, where he won awards in creative writing competitions in every year of study. There he was noticed by Joyce Carol Oates.

After graduating from university, he worked as an assistant in a morgue, a sales clerk in a jewelry store, a mathematics teacher, an archivist, and a ghostwriter.

Foer also edited the prose and poetry collection The Convergence of Birds; his works were published in a number of magazines, and one story received a Zoetrope award in 2000.

In 1999, he visited Ukraine, where he searched for evidence of his grandfather’s life. This trip inspired the novel Everything Is Illuminated, which was published in 2002.

If Foer’s first novel is connected with the events of the Holocaust, his second, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), is connected with September 11. Both novels were highly praised by critics and well-known writers such as Salman Rushdie, John Updike, Cynthia Ozick, and Isabel Allende, and were awarded several prizes.

Jonathan Safran Foer is a committed vegetarian, and in 2009 he published Eating Animals, a book offering a detailed analysis of the vegetarian lifestyle.

In spring 2008, Jonathan received an invitation to teach at Yale University. He is currently a professor at New York University.

He lived in Brooklyn with his wife, writer Nicole Krauss, and their two children. The marriage lasted 10 years, from 2004 to 2014.