Join us at 6pm on Monday June 25, 2018, at Santa Rosa Central Library for a talk and reading by author, academic, and journalist Elif Batuman as part of the library's Summer Reading Author Series.

Elif Batuman has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010. She is the author of the novel, “The Idiot,” which was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction,  and “The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them,” which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have been anthologized in the 2014 “Best American Travel Writing” and the 2010 “Best American Essays” collections. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor.

Batuman holds a doctoral degree in comparative literature from Stanford University. From 2010 to 2013, she was writer-in-residence at Koç University, in Istanbul. She lives in New York.