Daniel Torday

Daniel Torday

Acclaimed Story Writer & Essayist
Award-winning Novelist

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  • An Evening with Daniel Torday

Biography

“Torday’s ability to shift gears between sweeping historical vistas and more intimate family dramas, and between old-school theatrics and more contemporary meditations on the nature of storytelling, announces his emergence as a writer deserving of attention.” —The New York Times

“Daniel Torday is a singular American writer with a big heart and a real love for the world. He has the rare gift for writing dynamic action scenes while being genuinely funny.”— George Saunders

“Refreshingly (if at times devastatingly) uncanny, funny, and clever.” —The Millions

Daniel Torday is the author of three novels The 12th Commandment (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Boomer1 (St. Martin’s Press, 2018), and The Last Flight of Poxl West (Picador, 2015), a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and an International Dublin Literary Award nominee; and the novella The Sensualist, winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Outstanding Debut Fiction.

Swirling with secrets and their consequences, exploring how revelation and redemption might be accessed through sin, and driven through twists and turns toward a startling conclusion, Torday’s most recent, The 12th Commandment, is a brilliant new work. Entertainment Weekly describes Boomer1 as “A “sharp, funny take on the divide between baby boomers and millennials.” Author Phil Klay calls it “A wild, wickedly funny, and deeply empathetic look at modern American culture and politics. Sometimes he’s writing cutting satire, sometimes he’s writing Greek tragedy, and sometimes he’s just writing passages of staggering beauty, but he’s always a brilliantly compelling and necessary voice in these strange, troubling times.” In a cover review The Last Flight of Poxl West, The New York Times Book Review called the book, “Expertly crafted…full of lyrical prose, superb Rothian sentences that glide over the page as smoothly as a Spitfire across a cloudless sky.” NPR describes it as a “WWII novel-memoir” which shows us “how memoir and fiction can blur—and how hard it can be to convey truth.”

Torday’s fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, NPR, The Paris Review Daily, Esquire, and Tin House. His work has been included in both the Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays series.

A two-time National Jewish Book Awardee and winner the 2017 Sami Rohr Choice Prize, he is Director of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College.

Short Bio

Daniel Torday is the author of three novels The Last Flight of Poxl West, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and an International Dublin Literary Award nominee; Boomer1, The 12th Commandment. Torday’s work has appeared in The New York Times, NPR, The Paris Review Daily and Tin House, and has been honored in both the Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays series. A two-time National Jewish Book Awardee and winner the 2017 Sami Rohr Choice Prize, he is Director of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College.

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