Literary Birthday – 10 July – Karen Russell

Happy Birthday, Karen Russell, born on 10 July 1981.

Karen Russell Quotes

1. People really get myopic as they get older. We’re not a culture that encourages dreaming or distraction. We’re not ever good at just being.
2. When I was younger I used to lock myself in the bathroom and read in the dry tub.
3. Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.
4. For me, writing is a parenthesis where I can make sense of life.
5. I think that different pleasures work for different readers – a friend of mine won’t read anything that’s not a cardiovascular sort of page-turner. I tend to care less about plot, but I’m a sucker for humour and strangeness.
6. Sometimes it can feel like the whole globe is spinning with irredeemable losses, capricious natural disasters and crimes so outrageously evil they dismantle any attempt to solve or explain them.

Karen Russell is an American novelist and short-story writer known for her imaginative, unusual fiction. Her debut novel, Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her other books include the NYT bestsellers Vampires in the Lemon Grove and The Antidote, which was the winner of the 2026 Pacific Northwest Book Awards and a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award and the 2026 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Russell is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Stanford University.

by Amanda Patterson
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