Quick Facts
Biography
Donald Antrim (born 1958) is an American novelist. His first novel, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, was published in 1993. In 1999 The New Yorker named him as among the twenty best writers under the age of forty. In 2013, he was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Life
After graduating from Woodberry Forest School in 1977, Antrim graduated from Brown University, has taught prose fiction at the graduate school of New York University, and was the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow for Fiction at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany in Spring 2009. Antrim teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn.
Antrim is a frequent contributor of fiction to The New Yorker and has written two other critically acclaimed novels, The Verificationist and The Hundred Brothers, the latter of which was a finalist for the 1998 PEN/Faulkner Award in fiction.
He is also the author of The Afterlife, a 2006 memoir about his mother, Louanne Self. He has received grants and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
In 2013, he received a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation.
Family
Antrim is the brother of the artist Terry Leness and the son of Harry Antrim, a scholar of T. S. Eliot.