Nathan Englander is the author of the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, an international bestseller, and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, and the novels The Ministry of Special Cases, Dinner at the Center of the Earth, and kaddish.com. His books have been translated into twenty-two languages, and, among other prizes, he was chosen as one of Twenty Writers for the 21st Century by The New Yorker, is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, a Berlin Prize, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2013. His play The Twenty-Seventh Man premiered at the Public Theater in 2012. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University and lives with his family in Toronto.
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, a collection of short stories, was published in May 1999 and became an international bestseller. It earned him a PEN/Faulkner Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Nathan was selected as one of '20 Writers for the 21st Century' by The New Yorker, was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and numerous anthologies including The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Anthology, and the Pushcart Prize. His first novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, was published in 2007.