Teju Cole: Brooklyn's Wandering Chronicler
- Marina Aris
- Jul 23
- 3 min read
A note from our founder
Our sixteenth tribute in this new chapter goes to a writer who moves as freely between literature and visual art as his most famous character moves through the streets of New York. Teju Cole is a novelist, essayist, and photographer in equal measure, and he now writes from Brooklyn.
From Lagos to Kalamazoo
Teju Cole was born on June 27, 1975, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and raised in Lagos, Nigeria, returning to the United States at seventeen. He pursued an extensive academic path, earning his BA from Kalamazoo College, an MA in African Art History from the University of London (SOAS), and a PhD in 16th-century Northern European Art History from Columbia University.
A Flâneur's Vision
Cole is celebrated for a deeply intellectual, contemplative, boundary-blurring artistic vision that fuses literature with visual art. His work offers profound meditations on global displacement, systemic racism, travel, photography, and the quiet complexities of the modern flâneur, the urban stroller who reads a city by walking it.
Open City
His 2011 novel, Open City, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and established him as one of the most vital prose stylists of his generation. From 2015 to 2019, he served as the photography critic for The New York Times Magazine.
Teaching and Life in Brooklyn
A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, and a Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, Cole has exhibited his photography worldwide. He serves as the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Bibliography
Fiction
Every Day Is for the Thief (2007) — His lyrical debut novella, charting a nameless young man's return to Lagos after fifteen years away, navigating the vibrant yet deeply corrupt realities of his home city.
Open City (2011) — His globally acclaimed breakthrough novel following Julius, a young Nigerian psychiatrist, as he walks aimlessly through New York City and Brussels, unraveling layers of personal grief, historical trauma, and classical art.
Tremor (2023) — A formally inventive, deeply introspective novel following a West African art professor in New England as he navigates marriage, music, old friendships, and the ethical weight of colonial plundering.
Non-Fiction, Essays, & Photo-Books
Known and Strange Things (2016) — A sweeping, energetic collection of more than forty essays exploring topics ranging from literature and politics to travel and the history of photography.
Blind Spot (2017) — A stunning multi-media book compiling over 150 of Cole's original travel photographs, each accompanied by a poetic, philosophical text exploring visibility and perspective.
Fernweh (2020) — A striking photography monograph focusing on his time in Switzerland, subverting standard tourist imagery to contemplate distance, stillness, and looking.
Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time (2021) — A collection of urgent, deeply personal essays on art, ethics, color theory, and finding light and community amidst political despair.
Pharmakon (2024) — A collaborative visual and textual project exploring the concept of the remedy versus the poison in modern media culture.
READ COLE
Start with Open City for the novel that made his name, or Known and Strange Things if you'd rather begin with his essays. Either way, you're in the hands of a writer who treats walking, looking, and writing as versions of the same act. Get the book.
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