Idra Novey

“I'm drawn to write about people who've gotten written off, or have the compulsion to write off others. How people repeatedly misread and dismiss each other is fascinating to me. All my novels have begun with a consideration of the characters' inevitable blind spots and of my own. Why have humans created so many ways to write each other off? I return to this question in every draft of every book.”

Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction Finalist

Clark Fiction Prize Finalist

PEN America Poetry in Translation Prize Finalist

National Endowment for the Arts Fellow

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“In Idra Novey’s Soon and Wholly, the language of fables, with their strangeness, timelessness, and sense of foreboding, meets the world we live in right now—a world on fire, a world fracked and broken, a world in which we ‘snack on data’ and ‘sip conditioned air.’ And like fables, these poems are part cautionary tale, part imaginative alchemy, and wholly brilliant. I don’t know how Novey does it—‘This blue work. /This gluing of impossibilities.’—but I’ll read this book again and again, eager to learn.”

— Maggie Smith

“Take What You Need is exhilarating, a major novel. I read it in a white heat. Idra Novey writes with ferocious intelligence about the impulse to make beauty in a country coming apart at the seams.”

— Garth Greenwell

“Impressive...very much a book for grown-ups in that there are no neat solutions to messy relationships.”

— The New York Times on Take What You need

“Transforming the odd and the homely into something beautiful is both the subject and the accomplishment of this book.”

— Kirkus Reviews starred review for Take What You Need

“The women in Idra Novey’s novels—activists, dissidents, and translators of fiction with high ideals—set out to do the right thing. But they often get trapped in the details...How do we balance our responsibility to others with our own commitments? Few contemporary fiction writers have depicted this fraught state more effortlessly (or less obnoxiously) than Idra Novey.”

— The New Republic

“Novey’s characters are forever picking at their privileges, seeing them not simply as rhetorical admissions but as dangerous things . . . Novey’s breadth of insight, her ability to hold gender, class, racial and geopolitical privilege in her sights simultaneously . . . conjures riveting reading.”

— Huffington Post

“Novey writes with cool precision and breakneck pacing...this lush and tightly woven novel manages to be a meditation on all forms of translation while still charging forward with the momentum of a bullet.”

— New York Times Book Review

Idra Novey is a highly acclaimed novelist, poet, and translator. Her most recent novel is Take What You Need (Viking Books, 2023), which the New York Times called “impressive.” She is also the author of Those Who Knew, (Penguin Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2019 Clark Fiction Prize, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a Best Book of the Year with over a dozen media outlets, including NPR, Esquire, BBC, Kirkus Review, and O Magazine. Her first novel Ways to Disappear (Little, Brown and Company, 2016), received the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize, the 2016 Brooklyn Eagles Prize, and was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her first book of poetry in over a decade, Soon and Wholly, will be published by Wesleyan University Press in September 2024. Her other poetry collections include Exit, Civilian (University of Georgia Press, 2012), selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series by Patricia Smith, The Next Country (Alice James Books, 2008), a finalist for the 2008 Foreword Book of the Year Award, and Clarice: The Visitor (Cahier Series with Sylph Editions, 2014), a collaboration with the artist Erica Baum. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into a dozen languages and she’s written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, and The Paris Review.

She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers Magazine, the PEN Translation Fund, and the Poetry Foundation. Her works as a translator include Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. and a co-translation with Ahmad Nadalizadeh of Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, Lean Against This Late Hour, a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Prize in 2021.

In an interview with the novelist Maaza Mengiste, Mengiste asked how Novey’s work as a poet and translator influences how she uses form in her novels. Novey responded, “I’ve been interested in writing fiction and plays since high school, but for a decade or so my writing life was primarily focused on poetry and translation, which significantly shaped my instincts about form and about the possibilities of what a novel might contain, It is a slow way to proceed with a novel, trying to chisel each sentence like an end-stop line in a poem, but that’s my process.”

Novey lives in Brooklyn, NY and teaches fiction at Princeton University.

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