Paul Auster is the best-selling author of Invisible, Man in the Dark, The Brooklyn Follies, The Book of Illusions, The New York Trilogy,
among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias
Prize for Literature and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and
Letters. Among his other honours are the Independent Spirit Award for
the screenplay of Smoke and the Prix Medicis Etranger for Leviathan. He has also been short-listed for both the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions) and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (The Music of Chance). His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
In 1970 Paul Auster worked as a merchant seaman on an Esso oil tanker. From 1971 to 1974 he lived in France, spending two years in Paris and one in Provence. After returning to New York in 1974, he began his writing career.
Throughout the 1970s he wrote mainly poetry and essays which appeared in various magazines including the New York Review of Books. During the 1980s he concentrated on prose writing: a memoir and four novels were published.
His screenplay
Smoke and
Blue in the Face was published in April 1996 to coincide with the release of the film, and in 1999 Faber published the screenplay
Lulu on the Bridge.
The Art of Hunger (a collection of essays, interviews and prose) and his
Selected Poems were published in November 1998.
He is the author of ten novels, including
The New York Trilogy,
In the Country of Last Things,
The Invention of Solitude,
Moon Palace,
The Music of Chance,
Leviathan,
Mr Vertigo,
Timbuktu,
The Book of Illusions,
Oracle Night
and
Brooklyn Follies. He also edited the best-selling
True Tales of American Life, the
NPR National Story Project anthology.
He is married with two children and lives in Brooklyn.