Lara Vapnyar

Vapnyar has published four novels and two collections of short stories. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Open City (magazine), and Zoetrope: All Story.

Though Vapnyar’s husband and relatives found employment in the U.S. relatively easily, Vapnyar was unable to find a job. Feeling lonely and alienated, Vapnyar began to write stories in English. She was first published in 2002.

Vapnyar’s reliance on creative writing as a means to form her own identity is reflected in her frequent use of a trope—common to all the Fourth Wave writers—that has been defined as the “self-portrait of the author as a translingual and transcultural storyteller." This trope is essentially an act of parody, where novels and short stories produced by the group present protagonists that are authors or storytellers themselves, spending the majority of the narratives explaining their Soviet lives to American characters. In doing so, Vapnyar is able to “symbolically enact...[her] own role as a self-exoticising translingual writer who presents her culture of origin to an audience of American readers.”

Yelena Furman, "Hybridizing the canon: Russian-American writers in dialogue with Russian literature" Canadian Slavonic Papers 58, no.3 (2016)

In 2011 Vapnyar received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is currently pursuing her PhD in comparative literature at CUNY Graduate School and serves as an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University.

Vapnyar spent the first 23 years of her life in Moscow, where she earned a degree in Russian Language and Literature. Her mother was a professor of math education. In 1994, pregnant, she moved to the United States and later settled on Staten Island with her husband.

Lara Vapnyar (born 1971) is a Russian-American author currently living in the United States. She studied comparative literature at CUNY and worked with André Aciman and Louis Menand .