Adam Thirlwell

Adam Thirlwell (born 22 August 1978) is a British novelist. His work has been translated into thirty languages. He has twice been named as one of Grantas Best of Young British Novelists. In 2015 he received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is an advisory editor of The Paris Review. He was a Prize Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford between 2000 and 2007, and worked as assistant editor at the literary magazine Areté. He now lives in London. In 2011 he was the S Fischer Guest Professor of Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin. In 2015 he was announced as an Honorary Fellow of the Metaphysical Club at the Domus Academy in Milan.

Work

Thirlwell is the author of four novels: Politics (2003), The Escape (2009), described by Milan Kundera as "a novel where the humour is melancholic, the melancholy mischievous, and the talent startling", Lurid & Cute (2015), and The Future Future (2023).

He was the author of a project on the novel and translation, which includes a book first published in 2007 and chosen as a book of the year by Tom Stoppard in The Guardian and A. S. Byatt in the Times Literary Supplement. He guest-edited Multiples, an anthology of multiple translations for McSweeney's Quarterly. In 2019 he created Studio Créole, a group show with novelists and interpreters, co-curated with Hans Ulrich Obrist, which premiered at Manchester International Festival in July.

His experimental book with unfolding pages, Kapow!, was designed by Studio Frith and published by Visual Editions in 2012. It was nominated for the Design Museum's 2013 Designs of the Year awards and has been included in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. A book with the artist Philippe Parreno, Conversation, was published by Serralves Museum in 2017.

Thirlwell wrote a short film, Everyday Performance Artists, for Channel 4's Random Acts, directed by Polly Stenham and starring the voice of Shia LaBeouf, with Gemma Chan, James Norton, and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, in 2016. In 2018, he wrote and directed Utopia, starring Lily Cole, Lily McMenamy and Babirye Bukilwa.

His writing is published in The New York Times, Le Monde, and La Repubblica, as well as the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and The Believer. He has written columns for The Guardian and Esquire. In May 2015, he was named London editor of the Paris Review.

In June 2018 Thirlwell was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative.

Awards

2003: Granta "Best of Young British Novelists" 2003: Betty Trask Award, winner, Politics 2005: Lire "50 écrivains pour demain" 2008: Somerset Maugham Award, winner, Miss Herbert 2009: Encore Award, shortlist, The Escape 2013: Granta "Best of Young British Novelists" 2015: E.M. Forster Award, winner 2024: Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, shortlist, The Future Future 2024: Jan Michalski Prize, first selection, The Future Future 2025: Premio Gregor von Rezzori, shortlist, The Future Future