A novelist whose works of absurdity and social commentary have been translated into more than 20 languages, Jesse Ball is the author of more than 20 books of short and long fiction verse and drawings. He is a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Heinz Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, and Nederlands Letterenfonds (Dutch Foundation for Literature). He is the winner of the Gordon Burn Prize, as well as the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, and his books have been shortlisted or longlisted for the Believer Book Award, a New York Public Library Literary Lion, an L.A. Times Book Prize, and the National Book Award. His novels have also been an Editor’s Choice or A Book of the Year selection by The New York Times, NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle and The New Yorker. Ball was named a Granta Best Young American Novelist in 2017.  

Ball previously taught at UVA last year as the Kapnick Foundation Distinguished Writer-in-Residence. He will join the faculty in January 2025. 

His next novel, The Repeat Room, published by Catapult Books, will appear in September.