Judith Thurman is a writer, biographer, and critic. She has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1987, and, since 2000, as a staff writer specializing in profiles and cultural criticism. She is the author of Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, which won the 1983 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and is about the writer whose life inspired the Oscar-winning film Out of Africa. Her second biography, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Salon Book Award for Biography. She is also the author of two essay collections, Cleopatra’s Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire and A Left-Handed Woman, which won the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay in 2022.
Thurman is also the recipient of the Harold G. Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Rungstedlund Prize from the Danish Royal Academy; Bard College’s Mary McCarthy Award for a woman writer’s life work; and the Silvers-Dudley Prize for Arts Criticism. She is also a chevalier of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.