Teju Cole is a novelist, critic, and photographer. He is the author of the essay collection Known and Strange Things and two works of fiction, Every Day Is for the Thief and Open City. He has won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction, and the New York City Book Award. He has been short-listed for the PEN Open Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2015, he won the Windham Campbell Prize and a United States Artists Fellowship. His photography has been exhibited in India, Iceland, Germany, and the United States, and was the subject of a solo exhibition in Italy in 2016. He is the photography critic of The New York Times Magazine, where his “On Photography” column was a finalist for a 2016 National Magazine Award and was recognized with a 2016 Focus Award for excellence in photographic writing from the Griffin Museum of Photography. His forthcoming book is Blind Spot.