Born Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart[1] (Russian: Игорь Семёнович Штейнгарт) in the Soviet Union, he spent the first seven years of his childhood living in a square dominated by a huge statue of Vladimir Lenin in what is now St. Petersburg—which he alternately calls "St. Leningrad" or "St. Leninsburg". He comes from a Jewish family, with an ethnically Russian maternal grandparent,[3] and describes his family as typically Soviet. His father worked as an engineer in a LOMO camera factory; his mother was a pianist. When he was five, he wrote a 100-page comic novel.[4]
Shteyngart immigrated to the United States in 1979 and was brought up in Queens, New York,[5] with no television in the apartment in which he lived, where English was not the household language. He did not shed his thick Russian accent until the age of 14.[6]
After Oberlin, he worked a series of jobs as a writer for non-profit organizations in New York.[5][9]
Shteyngart took a trip to Prague in the early 1990s,[10] and this experience helped spawn his first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, set in the fictitious European city of Prava.[5]
In 1999, as part of the application to Hunter College's MFA program[4] he mailed a portion of his first novel to Chang-Rae Lee, the director of the creative writing program at Hunter College.[10] Lee helped Shteyngart get his first book deal.[11] Shteyngart earned an MFA in creative writing at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Shteyngart had a fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, for Fall 2007.[12] He has taught writing at Hunter College, and currently teaches writing at Columbia University.
Shteyngart has also become known for his prolific blurbing,[30][31] which has inspired a Tumblr website devoted to his Collected Blurbs,[32] a live reading,[33] and a fifteen-minute documentary narrated by Jonathan Ames.[34]
Shteyngart is married to Esther Won, who is of Korean descent. They have a son, born October 2013.[35] Shteyngart now lives in the Gramercy neighborhood of Manhattan.[31][36] He spends six months out of the year at a house in northern Dutchess County, in the Hudson River Valley where he does nearly all of his writing.[37][29][38][39][28][40]
^"Gary Shteyngart – Faculty". The Creative Writing Program at Columbia University. Archived from the original on May 13, 2011. Retrieved 2012-12-15. snapshot 2011-05-13 at archive.org