Laura van den Berg

Laura van den Berg – Life, Work, and Insightful Reflections

Discover the life and writing of Laura van den Berg (born 1983), an American fiction author celebrated for her haunting prose, short stories and novels, and her reflections on solitude, grief, and perception.

Introduction

Laura van den Berg is a contemporary American writer whose work often dwells in the spaces between absence and presence, memory and loss, reality and strangeness. With a deftness for short fiction and a growing reputation as a novelist, she crafts narratives that linger, unsettled and luminous. Her voice—precise yet poetic—is one that many readers of modern literary fiction turn to for its emotional intensity and imaginative reach.

Early Life and Education

Laura van den Berg was born on May 31, 1983, and grew up in Florida, U.S.
She earned a Bachelor of Arts (BA) from Rollins College (2005) and later an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College.

Her stories appeared early in distinguished literary journals, helping her build a reputation in the short fiction world: The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, Conjunctions, One Story, Ploughshares, and others have published her work.

She currently serves as a Senior Lecturer on Fiction at Harvard University’s English Department.

Van den Berg resides in the Hudson Valley with her husband, the writer Paul Yoon, and their dog.

Outside writing, she is known to box competitively at the amateur level, and she hosts a newsletter combining her interests in boxing and writing, titled FIGHT WEEK.

Career and Major Works

Van den Berg’s body of work spans short story collections, novels, and flash fiction. Below is a summary of her major publications and themes.

Short Story Collections & Early Work

• What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (2009) — her first collection.

• There Will Be No More Good Nights Without Good Nights (2012) — a chapbook of flash fiction.

• The Isle of Youth (2013) — her second collection of stories, shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2014.

• I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (2020) — her third full story collection, which was named one of Time magazine’s “10 Best Fiction Books of 2020.”

Novels & Later Fiction

• Find Me (2015) — Van den Berg’s first novel.

• The Third Hotel (2018) — a novel exploring grief, hauntingness, and dislocation; it was a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award.

• State of Paradise (2024) — her more recent novel.

• A forthcoming novel titled Ring of Night is in her pipeline.

Her fiction often inhabits dreamlike spaces, exploring loss, identity, disorientation, and how people navigate silence and absence.

Awards, Honors & Recognition

• Shortlisted twice for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award (2010, 2014)

• Winner of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters (for The Isle of Youth)

• In 2021, she received a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

• Her works have also been supported by National Endowment for the Arts fellowship programs.

Themes & Style

Laura van den Berg’s writing is often characterized by:

• Haunting imagery and psychological depth: her narratives frequently touch on grief, memory, haunting presences.

• Blurring of the real and the uncanny: ordinary settings shift subtly into the uncanny or dislocated.

• Fragment, absence, interiority: characters often struggle with silence, missing elements, or internal dislocation.

• Precise, lyrical prose: her sentences are economical but richly textured, often evoking sensory detail and emotional resonance.

• Unresolved tension: many of her stories and novels end with open questions, ambiguity rather than closure.

Her background in short fiction has informed her novels—she often brings the compressed emotional intensity of stories into longer forms.

Memorable Quotes

Here are a few quotes by Laura van den Berg that reflect her sensibility:

“The two impulses cannot be separated. The desire to have a life and the desire to disappear from it. The world is unlivable and yet we live in it every day.”
— The Third Hotel

“Is there any greater mystery than the separateness of each person?”
— Find Me

“If I leave the fictional world for too long, it's a bit like stepping through a portal … and then not knowing how to get back to where you were before.”
— Laura van den Berg

“Paradoxically, the only thing that helps when I’m feeling despairing about writing is to write.”
— Laura van den Berg

These lines illustrate her recurring focus on identity, separation, and the writer’s inner experience.

Lessons from Laura van den Berg’s Journey

1. Mastery in brevity can inform larger work
   Van den Berg’s strength in short stories carries over into her novels—her attention to small, haunting details helps sustain longer narratives.

2. Embrace disquiet as subject
   Rather than avoiding discomfort, her writing often leans into tension, absence, and disruption—showing that literature gains power through vulnerability.

3. Balance teaching and creation
   In her role as a lecturer and writer, she navigates pedagogy and production—teaching others while continuing to evolve as a writer.

4. Let silence and ambiguity be spaces, not gaps
   Her use of unresolved endings demonstrates that absence and uncertainty can be meaningful, not failures.

5. Persist across forms
   She moves between short fiction, novels, flash, and essays—her career shows flexibility and willingness to explore.

Conclusion

Laura van den Berg is a vital presence in contemporary American fiction: a writer whose stories remain quiet but resonant, whose novels unsettle as much as illuminate. Her work appeals to readers who relish reflection, emotional resonance, and a poetry of the inner life.