Julie Orringer

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

Julie Orringer is the author of The Invisible Bridge (Knopf, 2010), a novel set in Europe during the Second World War, and How to Breathe Underwater (Knopf, 2003), a collection of short stories.

At the Radcliffe Institute, Orringer is working on a novel about Varian Fry, a New York journalist who went to Marseille in 1940 to save writers and artists blacklisted by the Gestapo. Fry was a student at Harvard College in the late 1920s, where he cofounded and edited The Hound and Horn, a renowned literary magazine that published Elizabeth Bishop, E.E. Cummings, and others. Orringer is conducting research into Fry’s student experiences and considering how those experiences affected his remarkable later work.

Orringer is a graduate of Cornell University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and she was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. Her stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, the Paris Review, Ploughshares, the Washington Post, and the Yale Review and have been included in several anthologies. She is the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Her novel and story collection were named New York Times notable books and best books of the year by the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Washington Post and have been translated into a dozen languages. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The "American Schindler" (Harvard Gazette, 5/22/19)

A Character Fit for a Novel (Harvard Gazette, 12/2/13)