Lauren Elkin

Lauren Elkin is a Franco-American writer and translator. Her previous book, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Her translation, with Charlotte Mandell, of Claude Arnaud's biography of Jean Cocteau, won the 2017 French-American Foundation's Translation Prize. She is the translator of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel, The Inseparables. Her most recent books are Scaffolding and Art Monsters, both published in 2024. She currently lives in London, with her partner and son.

‘The beauty... was this unfolding element and that's a space you can live in.’ — Michael Rosen, on The Verb (BBC Radio 3)

'But what is wrong with slight? How are we asking books to be when we dismiss them for being slight, what isn’t in them that “should” be there?' — Lauren Elkin interviewed in The Paris Review.

'...cool is so boring, affectless, individualist, macho. I am so much more interested in writing that is willing to expose itself—not for the sake of exposure but out of an investment in emotional honesty. Give me inquisitiveness, exuberance, neuroses.' — Lauren Elkin interviewed in BOMB Magazine.

Read Lauren Elkin's interview for The Observer here, and for AnOther magazine here.

Lauren Elkin’s Notes on Craft for Granta.