John Wray

John Wray is a novelist and an efficient correspondent to The New York Click to look into! >> Read More... Times Magazine. He currently lives in Brooklyn. Born in Washington DC, with the name of John Henderson, he is the son of an American father and Austrian mother. Both his parents were scientists, and worked at the National Institute of Health.

John Wray (his pen name) spent his childhood days in the small city of Buffalo, in New York, and then later he shifted to Friesach, in southern Austria in Carinthia. He completed his high school from the Nichols School. He completed his graduation from the Oberlin College with a major in Biology. John dropped out from New York University’s M.F.A. program, where he was pursuing poetry, when he got the prestigious Academy of American Poets Prize. A few years later, he dropped out from Columbia University’s fiction program.

Born in DC, his mother began reading Penguin Classics frequently to become better in English. One of his memories of childhood is of having his mother read the whole series of The Pickwick Papers to him, and understanding nothing, but loving the atmosphere regardless. After dropping out of graduation, he had to soothe himself by becoming a bird-watcher. After completing his graduation, he worked as a cab driver in Petersburg, Alaska; as a grounds-keeper in Austin, Texas; and as a tutor of German and Spanish in Manhattan.

While his graduation was on, he enjoyed playing the drums, the guitar and bass. He was a member of quite a few bands such as The Naysayer, The King of France, and Marmalade He went to stay in South America, in 2002, to do some mountain climbing for a mountaineering book that never got written. He successfully climbed many of the Andean peaks such as Chimborazo, El Altar, Antisana, Aconcagua, and Cerro Cuerno. One of his other hobbies was collecting goofball stories. John Wray's debut novel was The Right Hand of Sleep, which received favorable reviews and a Whiting Award too.

His second novel Canaan's Tongue (2005) is a civil war novel based on the legend of the parson John Murell it had wild, deadly flights of fancy. In 2007, his name appeared among the list of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. He rode raft on the dangerous Mississippi River, for around 600 miles, in 2005, where he once dressed as a clown at a dinner-party. His third novel, Lowboy (2009), is narrated by William Heller, who is schizophrenic. During his childhood days, he befriended a kid, who he found amazing. Years later, the friend became schizophrenic and unfortunately took his own life. Wray said that it was one of the most formative single events of his adolescence.

As his novel is set in the subways of Manhattan, he recorded subway musicians for a Lowboy soundtrack. His recent novel, The Lost Time Accidents (2011), for which Wray devoted a good seven years into writing, narrated by Waldy Tolliver, is a comic and time mystery novel. John Wray received the Whiting Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellowship by the prestigious American Academy from Berlin. John was among the 2007 list of Grant’s Best Young American Novelists as well.