Justin Torres
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Justin Torres | |
|---|---|
 Torres at Ubud Writers Festival 2012 | |
| Born | 1980 (age 45–46) New York City, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist, writer |
| Nationality | American, Puerto Rican |
| Education | New York University The New School University of Iowa |
| Notable works | We the Animals (2011) Blackouts (2023) |
| Notable awards | First Novelist Award National Book Award for Fiction |
| Website | |
| www | |
Justin Torres (born 1980) is an American novelist and an associate professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles.[1] He won the First Novelist Award for his semi-autobiographical debut novel We the Animals (2011), which was also an Edmund White Award finalist and an NAACP Image Award for Debut Author nominee. The novel has been adapted into a film of the same title and was 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, Torres attended SUNY Purchase on scholarship but quickly dropped out.[8] He spent a few years of moving around in the country and taking whatever job came, until a friend invited him to sit in a writing course taught at The New School, which motivated him to start writing seriously.[5][9]
Career
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 is a former dog walker and a former employee of McNally Jackson, a bookstore in Manhattan.[6] Torres is currently an associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.[1][12]
He has published short fiction for The New Yorker,[13] Granta, Harper's, Tin House, Glimmer Train, The Washington Post, and other publications, as well as non-fiction for The Advocate and The Guardian.[14]
A film adaptation of We the Animals, directed by Jeremiah Zagar, premiered in 2018 at the Sundance Film Festival,[15] where it won the Next Innovator Prize.[2]
Awards and honors
Torres' first novel, We the Animals (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011),[16] won an Indies Choice Book Awards (Adult Debut Honor Award) and was also a Publishing Triangle Award finalist and an NAACP Image Award nominee (Outstanding Literary Work, Debut Author).[17] The novel also won the 2012 First Novelist Award.
Torres was named by Salon.com as one of the sexiest men of 2011.[18] In 2012, the National Book Foundation named him among their "5 Under 35" young fiction writers.[19][20]
His 2023 novel Blackouts, a historical fiction dealing with queer identity and suppression of LGBT culture, won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction[21] and was shortlisted for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction[22] and the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.[23] In 2025, the novel made longlist for the International Dublin Literary Award.[24]
Torres received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024.[25]
