Justin Torres is a novelist celebrated for a distinctly lyrical style that weaves truth and fiction, blending genres as he explores queer art, love, lineage, life, and death—and the multifaceted dynamics between family, friends, mentors, and strangers—through narrative. He is the author of the “shimmering, fable-like novel” (Washington Post) Blackouts, winner of the 2023 National Book Award, and the instant contemporary queer classic We the Animals, which was translated into fifteen languages and adapted into a feature film.

“Blackouts is a novel of aesthetic complexity, multiplicity, and beauty. Justin Torres responds to the literal, metaphorical, and historical erasures of queer sexuality, slowly unfolding more and more inventive “blackouts”—revealing, divulging, or re-elaborating mainstream narratives and thus creating newer and truer meanings. In the process of balancing fact and fiction, Torres creates a boldly original novel that both challenges and satisfies, and ultimately becomes an inventive artistic polysemy, inspirational and breathtaking.”

—National Book Award Judges Citation, Fiction Category

At the core of Blackouts is the imagined deathbed conversations between a young, unnamed narrator (referred to as Nene) and his friend and elder, Juan Gay. As Juan waits for his end, the two recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion, resurrecting loves, lives, mothers, fathers, and minor heroes. Juan shares his tattered and redacted copy of Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, and passes on his final wish: that Nene complete the story of Jan Gay, the real-life researcher whose early-20^th-century interviews with queer people across the United States and Europe offered the foundation of Sex Variants, but whose contributions ended up being eclipsed—and all but erased—by the scientists whose legitimacy she required to publish her work.

A dream-like and genre-defying creation, Blackouts incorporates erasure, photographs, testimony, illustrations, imaginary screenplays, and more as it insists that we look long and steadily at what we have inherited and what we have made. In doing so, it “reclaim[s] history—particularly queer history—and offers important lessons about how the forgotten past might be recovered and assimilated into an understanding of the present” (The Atlantic). The book has earned high praise from The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Time, The Wall Street Journal, BookPage, and NPR, among many others. Winner of the National Book Award in Fiction, Blackouts was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the California Book Award for Fiction, and the L.A. Times Book Prize.

“In language brilliant, poised and pure, We the Animals tells about family love as it is felt when it is frustrated or betrayed or made to stand in the place of too many other needed things, about how precious it becomes in these extremes, about the terrible sense of loss when it fails under duress, and the joy and dread of realizing that there really is no end to it.”

—Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer-winning author of Gilead

Marking the arrival of a new voice in American letters, Torres’ debut We the Animals presents readers with a moving coming-of-age story, which Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Harding likened to the “early work of Jeffrey Eugenides and Sandra Cisneros.” An autobiographical novella-length story told in vignettes, We the Animals depicts a family’s life—their chaos, heartbreak, and complex family dynamics. From the intense family unity that surrounds a child, to the resilience and permanence of brotherhood, to the profound alienation a young man endures as he begins to see himself in the world, this novel reinvents the coming-of-age story. The New York Times Book Review praised We the Animals as “a welterweight champ of a book… it delivers a knockout.” In 2024, the New York Times named We the Animals as one of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.

Pushing the boundaries of form and modern storytelling, Torres is an essential and urgent voice in fiction and queer canons. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Torres was named a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35,” a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library, and was a recipient of a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, LA Times Image Magazine, and Best American Essays. He lives in Los Angeles and is the Director of Creative Writing at UCLA. He is at work on a new novel.

For more information about Justin Torres, please visit him at justin-torres.com.