Rivka Galchen

Galchen's short-story collection, American Innovations, was published in 2014. It was longlisted for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and received the Danuta Gleed Literary Award.

Galchen served as the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fiction Fellow for the Spring 2011 term at the American Academy in Berlin.

Her first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, was published in May 2008. The novel was a finalist for the Mercantile Library's 2008 John Sargent, Sr., First Novel Prize, the Canadian Writers' Trust's 2008 Fiction Prize, and the 2008 Governor General's Award.

In October 2008, Galchen was teaching writing at Columbia University. In 2010, Galchen was chosen by The New Yorker as one of its "20 Under 40".

Galchen funded the beginning of her writing career after earning the MFA with the funds she received as a 2006 winner of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for women writers.

In 1994, Galchen began attending Princeton University, where she was an English major. In her sophomore year, she applied to an early-admissions program at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She received her M.D. from Mount Sinai in 2003. After medical school, she earned a MFA from Columbia University where she was a Robert Bingham fellow, completing the degree in 2006.

Galchen was born in Toronto, Ontario. When she was an infant, her parents relocated to the United States, where she has lived ever since. From 1981 to 1994 she lived in Norman, Oklahoma, where her father, Tzvi Gal-Chen, was a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma and her mother was a computer programmer at the National Severe Storms Laboratory.

Rivka Galchen (born April 19, 1976) is a Canadian-American writer. Her first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, was published in 2008 and was awarded the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.