Laura van den Berg’s most recent book is State of Paradise (FSG, 2024), which received starred reviews from Kirkus, Library Journal, and Booklist, and was named a must-read summer book by TIME, Publishers Weekly, Oprah Daily, and others. She is also the author of the widely praised short story collection I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (FSG, 2020), which NPR called “exquisite.” Other books include the novel The Third Hotel (FSG, 2018), a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award; the novel Find Me (FSG, 2015); and two other collections of stories, The Isle of Youth (FSG, 2013) and What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, 2009).

Laura’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts &Letters, a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bard Fiction Prize, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry Award, and the Jeannette Haien Ballard Writer’s Prize, a $25,000 annual prize given to “a young writer of proven excellence in poetry or prose.” She has twice been shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, Freeman’s, The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and One Story, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, and The Believer. She writes a boxing Substack called Fight Week.

Laura has taught creative writing in the graduate programs at The Michener Center, Columbia University, and Warren Wilson College. She is currently a Senior Lecturer on Fiction and the Director of Creative Writing at Harvard University.