Jonathan Safran Foer was born in 1977 in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Eating Animals. He has also edited a new modern edition of the sacred Jewish Haggadah. Everything Is Illuminated won several literary prizes, including the National Jewish Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award. He edited the anthology A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell, and his stories have been published in The Paris Review, Conjunctions and the New Yorker. Foer teaches Creative Writing at New York University, and his forthcoming book, Here I Am, will be published in Autumn 2016 by Hamish Hamilton.