Thirlwell was educated at the independent Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, Elstree. He read English at New College, Oxford, where he got the top first. He was a Prize Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford between 2000 and 2007, and worked as assistant editor at the literary magazine Areté. He now lives in London. In 2011 he was the S Fischer Guest Professor of Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin. In 2015 he was announced as an Honorary Fellow of the Metaphysical Club at the Domus Academy in Milan.
Work
Thirlwell is the author of three novels: Politics, The Escape described by Milan Kundera as "a novel where the humour is melancholic, the melancholy mischievous, and the talent startling", and Lurid & Cute. He is also the author of a project on the novel and translation, which includes a book first published in 2007, which was chosen as a book of the year by Tom Stoppard in The Guardian and A. S. Byatt in the Times Literary Supplement; and, as guest editor, Multiples, an anthology of multiple translations for McSweeney's Quarterly. In 2019 he created Studio Créole, a group show with novelists and interpreters, co-curated with Hans Ulrich Obrist, which premiered at Manchester International Festival in July. An experimental book with unfolding pages called Kapow!, designed by Studio Frith, was published by Visual Editions in 2012. It was nominated for the Design Museum's 2013 Designs of the Year awards and has been included in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. A book with the artistPhilippe Parreno, Conversation, was published by Serralves Museum in 2017. Thirlwell wrote a short film, Everyday Performance Artists, for Channel 4's Random Acts, directed by Polly Stenham and starring the voice of Shia LaBeouf, with Gemma Chan, James Norton, and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, in 2016. In 2018, he wrote and directed Utopia, starring Lily Cole, Lily McMenamy and Babirye Bukilwa His writing is published in The New York Times, Le Monde, and La Repubblica, as well as the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and The Believer. He has written columns for The Guardian and Esquire. In May 2015, he was named London editor of the Paris Review. In June 2018 Thirlwell was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative.
