Dara Horn

Dara Horn is an acclaimed American novelist and scholar whose fiction explores Jewish history, memory, and the stories people inherit and reinvent. She holds a PhD in Hebrew and Yiddish literature from Harvard University and has taught Jewish literature and Israeli culture at Harvard and Sarah Lawrence College.

Her debut novel, In the Image (2002), was followed by The World to Come (2006), All Other Nights (2009), A Guide for the Perplexed (2013), and Eternal Life (2018). Her novels range from a Chagall-inspired mystery involving a stolen painting, to the story of a Jewish Union spy during the Civil War, to an immortal woman who has lived through millennia of Jewish history. Her work often draws on rabbinic tradition, lost Jewish texts, and the long arc of Jewish survival.

Horn has received the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Granta named her one of the Best Young American Novelists. Her nonfiction book People Love Dead Jews (2021), a collection of essays on how the world engages with Jewish history and antisemitism, was a bestseller. Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Smithsonian. She lives in New Jersey with her family.