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Photo: Annette Hornischer

Writer, Berlin and New York

Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow in Fiction - Class of Spring 2015


Tom Drury is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York, and Berlin. Born in a small Iowa farm town, in 1956, he received a BA from the University of Iowa (1980) and an MA from Brown University in English/Creative Writing (1987). In 1990 he began publishing fiction in the New Yorker, working with the renowned editor Veronica Geng. Drury’s novels include The End of Vandalism (Grove, 1994), The Black Brook (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), Hunts in Dreams (Grove, 2001), The Driftless Area (Grove, 2006), and Pacific (Grove, 2013). He was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 1996 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000-2001. The End of Vandalism was cited as one of the best American novels of the past 45 years by GQ magazine (2002), and Pacific was long-listed for the National Book Award in 2013. Drury’s novels have been translated into German, Spanish, and French. His short fiction and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space, Ploughshares, Granta, New York Times Magazine, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and Mississippi Review. A short-film adaptation of his story “Path Lights” (2005), premiered on David Lynch Foundation TV in 2009 and was an official selection of the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, among many others. A feature film adaptation of The Driftless Area is forthcoming. Drury co-wrote both films with the director Zachary Sluser. In the 1990s Drury taught creative writing at Wesleyan University, and until the mid-2000s he worked off and on as a journalist for such newspapers as the Providence Journal, St. Petersburg Times, and the Litchfield County Times.

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