Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell is an American author and poet. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1978, he studied at Harvard University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and spent several years teaching in Bulgaria, an experience that informed his fiction. His debut novella Mitko (2011), later expanded into the novel What Belongs to You (2016), is a psychologically intense account of a gay American teacher's obsessive relationship with a Bulgarian hustler in Sofia. The novel was longlisted for the National Book Award and received extraordinary critical praise for the beauty of its prose and its unflinching exploration of desire, shame, and intimacy. Greenwell's linked story collection Cleanness (2020) continues to explore the same protagonist's inner life with equal psychological and formal rigor. His novel Small Rain (2024), about a poet hospitalised with a life-threatening medical emergency, won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2025 and was widely praised as his most fully achieved work—an elegy for the body and a meditation on vulnerability, care, and art. Greenwell is considered one of the essential voices in contemporary American fiction, celebrated for his Proustian sentences, his moral seriousness, and his commitment to the full complexity of gay experience. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa.