Justin Torres

Class of Fall 2025

Novelist; Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles

The Rule of Three

At the Academy, Torres is working on his third novel, “The Rule of Three.” Drawing on the “rule of three” in popular fables and folk tales, most notably by the Brothers Grimm, Torres tells the story of three bachelor brothers, all in their forties, in a shared moment of crisis. The action of the novel takes place over an extremely constricted timespan and explores themes of homelessness, precarity, and class conflict as well as the role of triadic relations in structuring social life.

Justin Torres is a novelist and professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award for his semi-autobiographical debut novel We the Animals (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011); the novel’s subsequent feature film adaptation won the Next Innovator Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Torres’s second novel, Blackouts (FSG, 2023), won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction and was named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, NPR, Washington Post, and New York Public Library. His short fiction and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, Washington Post, Glimmer Train, and Flaunt, among others. Torres has held fellowships and grants from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, and National Endowment for the Arts, among others. In 2010-11, he served as Picador Guest Professor in Literature at the University of Leipzig.