David Shankbone · CC BY-SA 3.0

Wrote Motherless Brooklyn (1999), a detective novel narrated by a protagonist with Tourette syndrome that won the National Book Critics Circle Award and brought him mainstream literary recognition after an earlier career mixing genre fiction with more traditional literary forms. His follow-up, The Fortress of Solitude (2003), became a New York Times bestseller. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005 and has taught creative writing at Pomona College since 2011.