Teju Cole

Teju Cole is a Nigerian-American writer, art historian, and photographer. Born in Michigan in 1975 to Nigerian parents, he grew up largely in Nigeria before returning to the United States for higher education. He holds degrees from Kalamazoo College, New York University, and completed his doctorate in art history at Columbia University. Cole is the author of the novels Every Day Is for the Thief (2007, published in the US 2014) and Open City (2011), which won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and the New York City Book Award among many others. Known and Strange Things (2016) is a collection of essays on photography, literature, and politics. His novel Tremor (2023), a meditation on the life of a Nigerian American music professor at Harvard, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction in 2024. He is also the photography critic for The New York Times Magazine. Cole's work is distinguished by its essayistic intelligence, its refusal of conventional plot, and its deep engagement with the visual arts, music, world history, and the experience of diaspora. He is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary voices in world literature. He teaches at Harvard University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.