Idra Novey is a novelist, poet, and translator. Her most recent novel Take What You Need was a The New York Times Notable Book of 2023, a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, and chosen as a Barnes & Noble Fiction Pick. Take What You Need was also named a Best Book of the Year with The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, NPR, Today, and Yiyun Li’s Author Pick at The Guardian. Her first novel Ways to Disappear was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Prize and a winner of the 2016 Brooklyn Public Library Prize and the Sami Rohr Prize. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into a dozen languages and she’s written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. In 2022, she received a Pushcart Prize for her story “The Glacier” published in The Yale Review.
Her works as a translator include Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. and a co-translation with Ahmad Nadalizadeh of Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, Lean Against This Late Hour, a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Prize in 2021. She teaches in Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program.
Her new book of poems Soon and Wholly was selected as a 2024 Poetry Foundation Staff Pick and named one of Electric Literature’s Best Poetry Books of 2024.