Elif Batuman

2010
Non-Fiction

Several of the essays in Elif Batuman’s first book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), were published in Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, and n+1, where she is senior writer. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The London Review of Books, and The Guardian. Ms. Batuman was born in New York City and grew up in New Jersey. She has a B.A. from Harvard and a doctorate in comparative literature from Stanford, and is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. In the coming year, she will be a writer in residence at Koç University in Istanbul.

The Whiting selection committee was delighted that Ms. Batuman had resisted the temptation to write a conventional memoir, instead taking a more slant approach in these deft, antic essays. “She doesn’t take herself too seriously, but she takes her enterprise completely seriously, even while remaining funny about it. She is sly, charming, erudite. The work takes utterly unexpected turns. Who would have believed the lives of contemporary graduate students could match the models of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in obsessiveness, wanderlust, and belief in the power of literature to transform the world?”