Justin Torres | |
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Born | 1980 (age 43–44) New York City, U.S. |
Occupation | Novelist, writer |
Nationality | American, Puerto Rican |
Education | New York University The New School The University of Iowa |
Website | |
www |
Justin Torres (born 1980) is an American novelist and an Assistant Professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles.[1] He won the First Novelist Award for his semi-autobiographical novel We the Animals which was also a Publishing Triangle Award finalist and a NAACP Image Award nominee. We the Animals has been adapted into a film and awarded the Next Innovator Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.[2] Torres' second novel, Blackouts, won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction.[3]
Justin Torres was born to a father of Puerto Rican descent and a mother of Italian and Irish descent.[4] He was raised in Baldwinsville, New York as the youngest of three brothers.[5][6] Although his novel We the Animals is not an autobiography, Torres has said that the "hard facts" in the novel mirror his own life.[6] City of God by Gil Cuadros, published in 1994, reportedly helped him to come out as gay.[7] After leaving his family home, he attended SUNY Purchase on scholarship but quickly dropped out.[8] After a few years of moving around in the country and taking whatever job came, a friend invited him to sit in a writing course taught at The New School which motivated him to start writing seriously.[5][9]
In 2010, Torres received his master's degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He was a 2010-2012 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.[10] He was a recipient of the Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists.[6] In the summer of 2016, Torres was the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig's Institute for American Studies in Leipzig, Germany.[11] He was a former dog walker and a former employee of McNally Jackson, a bookstore in Manhattan.[6] Torres is currently an Assistant Professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles.[1]
He has published short fiction for The New Yorker, Granta, Harper's, Tin House, Glimmer Train, The Washington Post, and other publications, as well as non-fiction for The Advocate and The Guardian.[12]
A film adaptation of We The Animals, directed by Jeremiah Zagar, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018,[13] where it won the Next Innovator Prize.[2]
His first novel, We the Animals (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011),[14] won an Indies Choice Book Awards (Adult Debut Honor Award) and was also a Publishing Triangle Award finalist and a NAACP Image Award nominee (Outstanding Literary Work, Debut Author).[15] Torres further won the 2012 First Novelist Award for We the Animals. Torres was named by Salon.com as one of the sexiest men of 2011.[16] In 2012 the National Book Foundation named him among their 5 under 35 young fiction writers.[17][18]
His 2023 novel Blackouts, a historical fiction, dealing with queer identity and historical suppression of LGBT culture, won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction.[19]