John Freeman (author)


John Freeman is an American writer and a literary critic. He was the editor of the literary magazine Granta until 2013, the former president of the National Book Critics Circle, and his writing has appeared in almost 200 English-language publications around the world, including The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal.

Early life

John Freeman was born in Cleveland, Ohio, grew up in New York, Pennsylvania and California, and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1996.

Career

Freeman's first book, The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand Year Journey to Your Inbox, was published in 2009. Freeman's second book, a collection of his interviews with major contemporary writers titled How to Read a Novelist, was published in the US in 2013 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book features profiles of Margaret Atwood, John Updike, Geoff Dyer, Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, and others. According to a 2013 interview with Newsmax, Freeman profiled a number of female authors in How to Read a Novelist and specifically began the book with Toni Morrison because he thinks “the literary culture is often masculinized. But many of our teachers are women. Often times, if you’re a reader it’s because your mother is a reader—as mine certainly was.”
During his six years on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, Freeman launched a campaign to raise awareness of the cutbacks in book coverage in national print media and to save book review sections.
Freeman joined the UK-based Granta in December 2008, became acting editor in May 2009, and was named editor in October 2009. While at the magazine, he edited Mary Gaitskill, Kenzaburō Ōe, Rana Dasgupta, Dinaw Mengestu, Peter Carey, Jeanette Winterson, Natsuo Kirino, Victor LaValle, Herta Müller, Daniel Alarcón, Wole Soyinka, Aleksandar Hemon, Salman Rushdie, Yiyun Li, Tony D'Souza, Colum McCann, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, George Saunders, Marie Darrieussecq, Joshua Ferris, Aminatta Forna, Jim Crace, Richard Russo, Kamila Shamsie, Mo Yan, A. L. Kennedy, Mohsin Hamid, and Chimamanda Adichie. Writers who debuted in Granta during his tenure included Chinelo Okparanta, Phil Klay, Claire Vaye Watkins and Maria Venegas.
Freeman edits a series of anthologies of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry entitled Freeman's, published in partnership with Grove/Atlantic and The New School. The first anthology appeared in October 2015, with new anthologies published twice a year. Explaining his vision for Freeman's, he says: "I want it to be a home for the long form... I hope it introduces new writers, and coaxes great ones to do something other than book-length writing." His anthologies are now published yearly and are currently translated into Italian, Chinese, Romanian and other languages.
His book of poetry, Maps, was published in 2017 by Copper Canyon Press. The Park, his second book of poems, was published in 2020.
Freeman was on the juries for the 2018 National Book Award for nonfiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
He serves as executive director of Literary Hub. He also edits a yearly poetry anthology for the Italian press Edizioni Black Coffee, along with the Italian translator Damiano Abeni. The series is called «Nuova poesia americana» and includes poems by six different poets. A new volume will be published yearly in December.
He is an artist-in-residence at New York University.

Personal life

Freeman lives in New York City.

Books

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