Joshua Cohen

Joshua Aaron Cohen was born on September 6, 1980, and is an American novelist and story writer. He had a Jewish Orthodox upbringing in New Jersey and studied composition at the Manhattan School of Music before turning to writing. He spent several years living in Eastern Europe, is fluent in German and Hebrew, and has written for numerous publications. He is known for works that blend intellectual ambition with dark humour and formal experimentation. Cohen's novels include Witz (2010), Book of Numbers (2015), and Moving Kings (2017). He won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family (2021), a comic campus novel inspired by literary critic Harold Bloom's encounter with historian Benzion Netanyahu—father of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—at an upstate New York college in the late 1950s. The novel was published by New York Review Books after twenty-four publishers rejected it.