Allen Kurzweil

A Case of Curiosities, a finalist for the Prix Médicis and the Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize, received the Premio Grinzane Cavour in 1993. In 1996 he was selected as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. His memoir, Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully, originally published as a personal history in the New Yorker, in 2016 received the Edgar Award in the category of "Best Fact Crime."

The son of Viennese Jewish refugees, Kurzweil was raised in Europe and the United States. Educated at Yale University and the University of Rome, he worked for ten years as a journalist in France, Italy, and Australia before settling in the United States. His first novel, A Case of Curiosities (1992), earned literary honors in England, Ireland, Italy, and France. His second novel, The Grand Complication, was published in 2001. Both works were included in The New York Times annual list of notable books. Kurzweil has written two award-winning children's books: Leon and the Spitting Image (2003), and Leon and the Champion Chip (2005), and, in 2015, published Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully, an Edgar Award winning "investigative memoir."

Allen Kurzweil (born December 16, 1960) is an American novelist, journalist, editor, and lecturer. He is the author of four works of fiction, most notably A Case of Curiosities, as well as a memoir Whipping Boy. He is also the co-inventor, with his son Max, of Potato Chip Science, an eco-friendly experiment kit for grade schoolers. He is a cousin of Ray Kurzweil.