Teju Cole

Throughout his career he has combined literature and photography, art criticism, and curating exhibitions. He was born in Nigeria and, in 1992, went to live in the United States where he made his literary debut in 2007 with the novel Every Day is for the Thief (published in Spanish as Cada día es del ladrón, Acantilado, 2016), which was followed by Open City (in Catalan as Ciutat oberta, Quaderns Crema, 2012 and in Spanish as Ciudad abierta, Acantilado), his second acclaimed novel which received several prizes, among them the PEN/Hemingway Award, New York City Book Award for Fiction, and the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His photographic work has been exhibited, among others, in Italy, Iceland, India, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. He also writes for several media outlets, among them The New York Times, New Yorker, Granta, and Brick. He is presently Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard and has recently published a book of photography set in Switzerland, Fernweh (MACK, 2020), in which he reflects on the intersections between the history of photography, tourism, and the fragility of landscape.