Jonathan Franzen was born in 1959 and is the author of five novels – The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, The Corrections, Freedom, Purity, – a collection of essays, How to Be Alone, a memoir, The Discomfort Zone and a translation of Spring Awakening, and most recently, The Kraus Project, a translation and consideration of Karl Kraus’s essays.

His honours include a Whiting Writers Award in 1988, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize in 2000, and the National Book Award in 2001. He writes frequently for the New Yorker, and lives in New York City.