Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellows in Letters

Katie Kitamura

Class of Fall 2026

Writer and Clinical Professor of Creative Writing

New York University

Untitled Novel

At the Academy, Kitamura is working on a sixth novel, which begins with two women: an acclaimed Japanese film director’s widow and his former protégée. As they sift through the director’s emerging archive, they confront questions of legacy, memory and betrayal, as well as the way personal biases create and inform institutional ones. At its heart, the novel is about national history and personal memory, and how the two intersect in art. How is the meaning of a work of art created? What kind of world does it call into being? And how does an artist live with the legacy of a work whose meaning was other than intended, and transforms over time?

Katie Kitamura’s most recent novel is Audition. A finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the Gotham Book Prize, it was one of President Obama’s Favorite Books of 2025. It was also longlisted for the Women’s Prize and the Carol Shields Prize. Her previous novel, Intimacies, was one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021, was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was one of President Obama’s Favorite Books of 2021. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Cullman Center Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Literature and the Prix Litteraire Lucien Barriere, Kitamura’s work has been translated into 29 languages and is being adapted for film. Kitamura teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University and is an Editor at Large at the Yale Review.