John Irving

Award-Winning Novelist

Widely regarded as an American literary legend, John Irving’s expansive, multi-layered fiction addresses the insistent concerns of contemporary American life, including sexual politics, religious experience, and the fallibility of human institutions. As prolific as he is revered, Irving has sold over 12 million books in 35 languages over four decades. “He is as close as one gets to a contemporary Dickens,” TIME recently observed, “in the scope of his celebrity and the level of his achievement.”

In 1980, Irving won a National Book Award for his novel The World According to Garp, which was also made into a critically acclaimed film. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for adapting his own novel The Cider House Rules. Other books include the international bestsellers A Prayer for Owen Meany, Hotel New Hampshire, Until I Find You and Avenue of Mysteries. His fifteenth and—according to the author— “last long novel” is The Last Chairlift. Due to be released in October 2022, the new book is a ghost story, a love story, and an incisive exploration of contemporary sex and relationships, set against the ski slopes of Aspen, the lanes of New England, and beyond.

Irving was recognized with the 2018 Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation, and in 2019 he was awarded the Medal of Honor for Literature by the National Arts Club. A dual citizen of Canada and the U.S., he lives in Toronto.