T. Coraghessan Boyle

Raised in Westchester County, New York in the 1960s, T.C. Boyle weathered a rebellious youth (he describes his younger self as “a maniacal, crazy driver [and] a punk pure and simple) and a drug-addled early adulthood before landing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he studied with American masters of the short story John Cheever and Raymond Carver. Inspired by writers of the grotesque and the fantastic such as Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Flannery O’Connor, Boyle’s work melds satire and dark comedy, moral inquiry, and observations on humanity’s role in the destruction of nature. The author of sixteen novels and eleven short story collections, Boyle’s starry career spans four decades. He has won awards from the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, the O. Henry Prize, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.