Daphne Kalotay | |
|---|---|
| Citizenship | United States and Canada |
| Education | Vassar College, Boston University |
| Relatives | Andrew Kalotay (father) |
| Writing career | |
| Notable works | Calamity and Other Stories, Russian Winter, Sight Reading |
| Notable awards | Florence Engel Randall Fiction Prize, Transatlantic Review Award from The Henfield Foundation, 2011 Writers' League of Texas Fiction Prize |
Daphne Kalotay is a novelist and short story writer who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. She is known for her novels, Russian Winter (Harper, 2010), Sight Reading (Harper, 2013), and Blue Hours (TriQuarterly, 2019) and her two collections of short stories, Calamity and Other Stories (Doubleday, 2005) and The Archivists (TriQuarterly, 2023). She is a graduate of Vassar College and holds an MA in creative writing and a PhD in literature from Boston University, where she has also taught. In addition, she has taught at Middlebury College and been a writer-in-residence at Skidmore College and Lynchburg College. From 2014 to 2016 she was the Visiting Writer in English at the University of Massachusetts Boston. From 2017 to 2023 she was a lecturer at Princeton University. She currently teaches at Harvard Extension School. She is a citizen of both the United States and Canada.
Kalotay was raised in Madison, New Jersey, and attended Vassar College. In 1993, she moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, to attend Boston University's Masters Program in Creative Writing and remained at Boston University to complete a PhD in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the now-defunct University Professors Program. Studying under her advisor Saul Bellow, she wrote a dissertation on the Canadian writer Mavis Gallant and graduated in 1998.
In 1999, she moved to Vermont for a term position at Middlebury College, where she taught for the English department. She returned to Massachusetts in 2002 and since then has lived in the Boston area. From 2012 to 2014, she served as co-president of the Women's National Book Association's Boston chapter. In 2017, her short story "Relativity" was the One City/One Story Boston selection. The Archivists was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the 2024 Massachusetts Book Awards. It was a Boston Author's Club "Notable Book."
Kalotay has received numerous awards for her fiction, including the 2011 Writers' League of Texas Fiction Prize for her novel Russian Winter and the Florence Engel Randall Fiction Prize and a Transatlantic Review Award from The Henfield Foundation.
Her novel Sight Reading won the 2014 New England Society Book Award and was a finalist for the 2014 Paterson Fiction Prize. Calamity and Other Stories made the short list for the 2005 Story Prize. Blue Hours was a Massachusetts Book Awards "Must Read" The Archivists won the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. It was a Boston Author's Club "Notable Book."
She has been awarded fellowships from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, MacDowell, the Bogliasco Foundation, and Yaddo. Her short fiction collection, Calamity and Other Stories, was shortlisted for the 2005 Story Prize. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Rumpus, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, O Magazine, The Oregonian, Good Housekeeping, USA Today and dozens of other publications.
