LW Online Biographies

Daniel Alarcón is the author of the story collection War by Candlelight, a finalist for the 2005 PEN-Hemingway Award, and the novel Lost City Radio. He is associate editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning quarterly published in his native Lima, Peru, and co-founder of Radio Ambulante, a Spanish-language radio program showcasing human stories from around Latin America and the United States. His fiction, journalism, and translations have appeared in McSweeney’s, Harper’s, and n+1, among others. Alarcón lives in Oakland, California, where he is a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies.

Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Adichie’s debut novel, was published in 2003 and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She is also the author of the novel Half of a Yellow Sun and the short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck. Her writing has appeared in various publications including The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003, The New Yorker, The Financial Times, and Zoetrope. The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Adichie grew up in Nigeria and now divides her time between there and the United States.

Salman Rushdie is the author of the novel Midnight’s Children, which won the Booker Prize as well as the Best of the Booker Prize. Among his other novels are Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and Fury. His works of nonfiction include Imaginary Homelands, Step Across This Line, and the memoir of his years of hiding during the fatwā, Joseph Anton, published in September 2012. He was born in Bombay, India, and now lives in New York.

Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006. He is the author of the bestselling novels Snow and My Name is Red, which won the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His other works include Istanbul: Memories and the City and Other Colors, a collection of essays, as well as eight novels including The White Castle, The Black Book, and, most recently, The Museum of Innocence. He lives in New York.