American · b. 1977
Jonathan Safran Foer is an American novelist and nonfiction writer, born in Washington, D.C., in 1977. He studied philosophy at Princeton, where Joyce Carol Oates supervised his thesis. His first novel, Everything Is Illuminated (2002), follows a young American searching for the woman who saved his grandfather in Ukraine during the Holocaust. It won the National Jewish Book Award and became a film in 2005. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005) tells of a boy who lost his father on September 11 and uses photographs, blank pages, and a flip-book ending. Foer also wrote Eating Animals (2009), a nonfiction account of factory farming, and We Are the Weather (2019), on climate change and diet. His novel Here I Am appeared in 2016. He has edited the book-length project The New American Haggadah and taught creative writing at New York University. His work is known for mixing visual experiment with plain, emotional storytelling.