About Benjamin Moser
Benjamin Moser is an American writer, translator, and literary critic. Benjamin Moser was born and raised in Houston, Texas, in 1976. He studied at St. John’s School and graduated from Brown University with a degree in History.
Having intended to study Chinese, he soon switched to Portuguese. A decision that would prove influential in his future writing career. Benjamin Moser set out into the world, travelling and writing – eventually becoming a freelance writer for Harper’s Magazine and The New York Review of Books.
After a stint of living in the hustle and bustle of New York and London, Benjamin Moser moved to Utrecht in the Netherlands, with his partner Arthur Japin. He moved there in 2002. The home they share is now also their place of work. Like Moser, Japin is a novelist with over a dozen titles to his name. Unsurprisingly, the attic space of the property has been converted into an extensive library, with views across the medieval city’s rooftops.
The beginning of a biographer
Moser was in Utrecht in 2005 reading up on Clarice Lispector, a Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short story writer, when a friend mentioned that the author’s work would be the centre of attention for the second “Paraty International Literary Festival” in Brazil. Moser immediately hopped on a plane and headed to São Paulo. A decision that would change his life.
After the event, Benjamin Moser began squeezing time for a new project into his already busy life of writing. Moser began researching and writing the biography of Clarice Lispector. Lispector is a famously beautiful author whose writing career spanned 1943 to 1977 before her life was cut short by cancer. As part of this research, Benjamin frequently travelled to Brazil, going on to call it his second home.
Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector
Moser’s first book, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, was published in 2009. Fascinated by her works, he has since gone on to translate and publish many more of Lispector’s novels and short stories.
In 2013, Moser’s translation of Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Benjamin Moser has said that he feels a great deal of kinship with Lispector. They are both expatriates who write in a foreign language. “It’s very easy for me to understand her because we have so much in common,” he told The Paris Review in 2013. “We’re both foreigners. We both live in countries that we didn’t grow up in. We both work in languages that are not our first languages.” For his work in bringing Clarice Lispector to the world’s attention, he received Brazil’s first State Price for Cultural Diplomacy.
Moving on from Lispector
In 2016, Moser published a book of essays in Portuguese called Autoimperialismo: três ensaios sobre o Brasil (Autoimperialism: Three Essays on Brazil), dedicated to a Brazilian movement to reclaim urban spaces from the clutches of the wealthy organisations.
In the wake of the 2016 U.S. elections, Benjamin founded the Daily Action Book Club to educate citizens on the American heritage of social change and resistance. Benjamin Moser has been writing steadily for two decades and won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017.
During this time, Moser began working on a biography of the American writer, philosopher, and political activist, Susan Sontag. His book, Sontag: Her Life and Work, was published in 2019.
New York Times besteller
It went on to be a New York Times bestseller and named one of the best books of the year by over a dozen publications. The book was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Moser also won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography.
For his work on Susan Sontag’s biography, Moser was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction in 2020. An award he has described as “the highest honour in American letters.”
Translated over twenty languages
He has also written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Vogue, The Nation, The Paris Review, Bookforum, and Bomb. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.