Paul La Farge (1970-2023)

Author Paul La Farge, 52, died of cancer on January 18, 2023. His novel The Night Ocean (2017) was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist.

Paul Bayard La Farge was born November 17, 1970 in New York City, and was a graduate of Yale University. He taught writing at Bard College, Wesleyan, and the University of Leipzig, and from July 2020 was a member of the faculty at Bennington College. Debut novel The Artist of the Missing appeared in 1999, and was followed by Haussmann; Or, the Distinction (2001), The Facts of Winter (2005), Luminous Airplanes (2011), and The Night Ocean (2017). His work often had metafictional and fantastic elements, and The Night Ocean concerns an author obsessed with the life of H.P. Lovecraft.

He did writing residencies at Yaddo in 1999 and MacDowell in 2002, and won a Guggenheim Fellowship (2002) and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship (2012). His many prizes include two California Book Awards and the Bard Fiction Prize.

He is survived by his wife, Sarah Stern.

For more, see his entry at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.