Faculty Leaders

Anthony Marra

lecturer of English

Anthony Marra is currently a Jones Lecturer in Fiction at Stanford University and holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. In 2010, his short story Chechnya won a 2010 Pushcart Prize and the 2010 Narrative Prize. He was one of the first foreign tourists to visit the post-war republic of Chechnya, and was interviewed on three Chechen television programmes as a result. His first novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, was published in May 2013 and will be translated into over a dozen languages. A New York Times writer said, “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is ambitious and intellectually restless.... a prose writer who resembles the Joseph Heller of Catch-22 and the Jonathan Safran Foer of Everything Is Illuminated.” He has lived and studied in Eastern Europe, and now resides in Oakland, CA.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena won the National Book Critics Circle’s inaugural John Leonard Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in fiction, as well as the inaugural Carla Furstenberg Cohen Fiction Award. Marra’s novel was a National Book Award long list selection as well as a shortlist selection for the Flaherty-Dunnan first novel prize.

ACCOLADES:

-- Whiting Award

-- Pushcart Prize

--The Atlantic‘s Student Writing Contest and the Narrative Prize

--His work has been anthologized in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012

-- His novel received the inaugural John Leonard Prize given by the National Book Critics Circle for a first book. It also won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award