Donald Antrim

Who is Donald Antrim?

Donald Antrim is an American novelist. His first novel, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, was published in 1993. In 1999 The New Yorker named him as among the twenty best writers under the age of forty. In 2013, he was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Antrim is a frequent contributor of fiction to The New Yorker and has written a number of critically acclaimed novels, including The Verificationist and The Hundred Brothers, which was a finalist for the 1998 PEN/Faulkner Award in fiction. "He's written three novels that could all be labeled as short, comic works of surrealism, a description that utterly fails to capture how unusual and wonderful and beautiful they are."

He is also the author of The Afterlife, a 2006 memoir about his mother, Louanne Self. He has received grants and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. In 2013, he received a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation, a so-called Genius Grant.

Antrim is the brother of the artist Terry Leness and the son of Harry Antrim, a scholar of T. S. Eliot.