Garth Greenwell ’01

Garth Greenwell ’01 writes with great “originality and power” (New Yorker) about queerness, consciousness, bodily desire, and the experience of beauty.

Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which ​won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It is being adapted into a feature film and an opera.

His second book of fiction, Cleanness, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize, and France’s Prix Sade (Deuxième sélection). It was a New York Times Notable Book and ​was named a Best Book of the year by The New Yorker, TIME, NPR, the BBC, and over thirty other publications.

Greenwell is also the co-editor, with R.O. Kwon, of the anthology KINK, which appeared in February 2021, was named a New York Times Notable Book, won the inaugural Joy Award from the #MarginsBookstore Collective, and became a national bestseller. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written nonfiction for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and Harper’s, among others.

The recipient of honors including a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2021 Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Greenwell lives in New York and teaches at Princeton University.