Fellowship / Fellows

David Bezmozgis

  • 2011–2012
  • Fiction & Poetry
  • Lisa Goldberg Fellow
  • Independent Writer (Canada)
Headshot of David Bezmozgis
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

David Bezmozgis, a writer and filmmaker, is the author of the collection Natasha and Other Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004) and the novel The Free World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). His stories and essays have appeared in the Guardian, Harper’s, the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and other publications. His first feature film, Victoria Day, premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

At Radcliffe, Bezmozgis will work on “The Betrayers,” a novel about a famous Russian Jewish dissident who, after the fall of the Soviet Union, meets the man who denounced him 30 years earlier. One man has become a Zionist hero and an Israeli politician, while the other has become a pariah. Set in present-day Crimea, the novel will examine the toll exacted by ideology and principles on people’s private lives.

Bezmozgis’s stories have twice appeared in the anthology Best American Short Stories. Natasha won a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and was a New York Times notable book and one of the New York Public Library’s 2004 “Books to Remember.” He has received fellowships from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Sundance Institute. In 2010, Bezmozgis was included in the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Summer Fiction Issue. He holds a BA in English from McGill University and an MFA in production from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.

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