BRIAN DUREN
Brian Duren was born and raised in Minnesota. He earned a Doctorate in French literature from the University of Paris, as well as a B.A. in English and a Ph.D. in French from the University of Minnesota, and taught modern French literature and European cinema at the Universities of Texas, Tulsa, Iowa, and Minnesota. He eventually left teaching and became an administrator.
After retiring from academe, Brian launched a new career as an author of literary fiction. He writes novels with an introspective quality about nomadic characters who travel through time and space, always returning to what haunts them. His first novel, Whiteout, praised by the St. Paul Pioneer Press as a “stunning debut novel, worthy of national recognition,” won the Independent Publisher Gold Medal for Midwestern Fiction. Peter Geye lauded Brian’s second book, Ivory Black, as “a novel of profound elegance,” while Junot Diaz described his third, The Gravity of Love, as “a magnificent haunting duet of grief, absence, and the unshakable bonds of family …” Brian is working on his fourth novel, Day Brings Back the Night.