Rivka Galchen

Rivka Galchen (born April 19, 1976) is a Canadian-American writer. Her first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, was published in 2008 and was awarded the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.

Early life

Galchen was born in Toronto, Canada. When she was an infant, her parents relocated to the United States, where she has lived ever since.^[1] She lived in Norman, Oklahoma from 1981 to 1994, where her father, Tzvi Gal-Chen, was a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma and her mother was a computer programmer at the National Severe Storms Laboratory.^[2][3] Her parents, of Jewish descent, emigrated from Israel before her birth.

In 1994 Galchen began attending Princeton University, where she was an English major. In her sophomore year, she applied to an early-admissions program at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.^[2] She received her M.D. from Mount Sinai in 2003, with a focus in psychiatry.^[4] After medical school, she received an MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Robert Bingham fellow.^[5] She was a 2006 recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for women writers.^[4]

In early 2011, Galchen served as the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fiction Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.^[6]

Career

Galchen has written for several national magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, and The Believer.

Her first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, features a character with her father's name, Tzvi Gal-Chen. The character is a professor of meteorology and a fellow of the fictional Royal Academy of Meteorology.^[7] The novel was published in May 2008.^[5] The novel was a finalist for the Mercantile Library's 2008 John Sargent, Sr., First Novel Prize, the Canadian Writers' Trust's 2008 Fiction Prize,^[8][9] and the 2008 Governor General's Award.^[10]

Galchen teaches writing at Columbia University^[11] and is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine.

In 2010 Galchen was chosen by The New Yorker as one of its "20 Under 40".^[12]

Galchen's short-story collection, American Innovations, was published in 2014.^{[13][14][15][16][17]} The collection was longlisted for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize and awarded the Danuta Gleed Literary Award.

Bibliography

Fiction

Novels

• Galchen, Rivka (2008). Atmospheric disturbances. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

Short Story Collections

• Galchen, Rivka (2014). American Innovations: Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

Non-Fiction

• Galchen, Rivka (2016). Little Labours. New York: New Directions. 

List of short stories

Essays and reporting

• "My Mother, Myself". The New York Times, 2007.
• "Dream Machine: The Mind-Expanding World of Quantum Computing". The New Yorker, 2011.
• "From the pencil zone: Robert Walser's masterworklets". Harper's Magazine, 2010.
• "Borges on Pleasure Island" (2010), essay in the New York Times
• "Disaster Aversion: The Quest to Control Hurricanes". Harper's Magazine, 2009.
• "Case Notes of a Medical Student". Triple Canopy.
• "The Future of Paper". This Land, 2011.
• Galchen, Rivka (May 13, 2013). "Every disease on Earth : Elmhurst Hospital's medical melting pot". Annals of Medicine. The New Yorker. 89 (13): 50–57. 
• — (June 3, 2013). "Big weather". The Talk of the Town. In Oklahoma. The New Yorker. 89 (16): 18–19. 
• The Melancholy Mystery of Lullabies: On the bonds made between parents and children during a nightly ritual. New York Times Magazine, 2015
• — (April 13, 2015). "Weather underground : the arrival of man-made earthquakes". Letter from Oklahoma. The New Yorker. 91 (8): 34–40. Retrieved 2015-06-19. 

References

External links

Interviews

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Rivka Galchen.

• Interview of Galchen at The Fabulist
• Interview of Galchen at The Paris Review

Reviews

• New York Times review of Atmospheric Disturbances
• Salon review of Atmospheric Disturbances
• James Wood review in "The New Yorker"
• "New York Times" review of "American Innovations"
• "Globe and Mail" review of "American Innovations"

Author page

• author web page