Teju Cole

Teju Cole

Teju Cole is a Nigerian-American writer, photographer and art historian whose works have been published both nationally and globally . He was one of the photography critics of the New York Times Magazine from 2015 to 2019 and is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard.

Teju’s writings have been described  by critics to have “created a new path in African literature”, and this is evident in the success of his works internationally. He has contributed to several publications including The New York Times, Qarrtsiluni, Granta, The New Yorker, Transition magazine, The New Inquiry,  A Public Space amongst others.

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Some of his works include, Every Day Is for the Thief, a 2007 novella which was named book of the year by the New York Times, the Globe and the Telegraph. It was also shortlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award. 

Teju Cole’s novel, Open City, written in  2016 was featured on numerous book of the year lists, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City Book Award for Fiction, the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Internationaler Literaturpreis. It was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and the Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature. Other works include Known and Strange Things and the photobook Punto d’Ombra, published in 2016 and later published in English in 2017 as Blind Spot. Teju’s Blind Spot was described as one of the greatest books of the year by Time Magazine in June 2017. 

In 2016, his work “On Photography” for The New York Times Magazine became a finalist for a National Magazine Award. 

Solo exhibitions of his photography have been held in Italy, Iceland, India, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and the United States. 

Teju gave the 2014 Kenan Distinguished Lecture in Ethics at Duke University, the 2015 Susan D. Gubar Lecture at Indiana University, and the 2016 Spui25 Lecture at the University of Amsterdam. 

Additionally, he delivered the Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Family Lectures at the University of Chicago in April 2019, gave the Class Day speech at the Commencement Ceremony of the Harvard Graduate School of Design in May 2019, and curated an exhibition titled Go Down Moses at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in July–September 2019. In 2021, he served as a guest curator at the Orchestra of St Luke’s, with a text and music program called Radia; and he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Teju holds a Doctorate  in art history from Columbia University and a certificate in African art history from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London

In recognition of his contributions to Literature, Teju was awarded the 2015 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction, a 2015 US Artists award, and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship. He was a Poynter Journalism Fellow at Yale University in 2018 and serves as a Board Member for several periodicals and arts organizations.