A Conversation with Teju Cole

Teju Cole is a writer, art historian, and photographer. He is the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College and photography critic of the New York Times Magazine. He is the author of the novella Every Day is for the Thief, named a book of the year by The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, NPR, and The Telegraph, and shortlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award. His second book, a novel, Open City, was also featured on numerous book of the year lists, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City Book Award for Fiction, the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Internationaler Literaturpreis, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and the Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature. He is currently at work on a book-length non-fiction narrative of Lagos, and is engaged in curatorial projects. He was awarded the 2015 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction.

Cole has contributed to The New York Times, the New Yorker, Qarrtsiluni, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, Granta, Aperture, Transition, A Public Space, the New Inquiry, and several other magazines. His photography has been exhibited in India and the US, published in a number of journals, and will be the subject of a solo exhibition in Italy. He has lectured widely, from the Harvard Graduate School of Design to Twitter Headquarters, and gave the 2014 Kenan Distinguished Lecture in Ethics at Duke University.

“A powerful and unnerving inquiry into the human soul. Cole has earned flattering comparisons to literary heavyweights like J.M. Coetzee, W.G. Sebald and Henry James, but Open City merits higher praise: it’s a profoundly original work, intellectually stimulating and possessing of a style both engaging and seductive.”—Time Magazine

“[Teju Cole’s] novels are lean, expertly sustained performances. The places he can go, you feel, are just about limitless.”—The New York Times

“Beautiful, subtle, and finally, original.”—The New Yorker

The Jordan Lectures are generously supported by the Elizabeth Turner Jordan '59 Fund.

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