Teju Cole

Teju Cole is a novelist, photographer, critic, curator, and the author of several books. He was the photography critic of The New York Times Magazine from 2015 until 2019. A 2015 winner of the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction, he is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard. Cole’s 2011 novel, Open City, won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City Book Award for Fiction, the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Internationaler Literaturpreis, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and several other prizes. His most recent book, the essay collection Black Paper, was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and named a book of the year by the Paris Review. Born in the US to Nigerian parents and raised in Lagos, Cole currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.