“My parents were educated in the Turkish system and went straight from high school to medical school; my mom, who had skipped a grade, was dissecting corpses at age seventeen. Growing up in America, I think I envied my parents' education. By comparison, everything I did in school seemed so sort of low-stakes and infantilizing.”

American author, academic, and journalist

Elif Batuman is an American author, academic, and journalist. She writes fiction and nonfiction, and is known for The Possessed, The Idiot, and Either/Or. Her work spans memoir, the novel, and magazine journalism. She is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and her books include The Possessed (2010), The Idiot (2017), a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Either/Or (2022).