Justin Torres

Justin Torres was born in 1980 in Rochester, New York, to a Puerto Rican father and white mother. He earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has taught at various institutions. He is widely recognised as one of the most significant voices in queer American literature. His debut novel We the Animals (2011), an autofictional story of three mixed-race brothers growing up in upstate New York, was a critical success and was adapted into a celebrated independent film in 2018. His second novel Blackouts (2023), an experimental work of collage and queer history centred on the story of Juan Vicente Melo and the erasure of queer experience from American history, won the National Book Award for Fiction 2023.