Background

Jonathan Treitel was born in 1959, in London, United Kingdom.

Education

Jonathan Treitel earned a Master of Science in theoretical physics and a Doctor of Philosophy in the philosophy of science from Stanford University.

Career

Jonathan Treitel is the author of short stories, who is best known as the author of Red Cabbage Café (1990), a critically acclaimed novel set in Moscow in the years just after the 1917 Russian Revolution. The book is the story of Humphrey Veil, a left-leaning Anglo-German-American engineer who has been hired to design a new subway system for the capital of the Soviet Union. Humphrey falls in love with a young woman named Sophia, the curator of a wax museum. It is Sophia who introduces Humphrey to the Red Cabbage Café, the seedy bohemian saloon from which the novel draws its name. Sophia also involves Humphrey in a spy ring and a love triangle with a pretentious Russian artist-poet named Gritz as the third party.

Treitel's second novel, Emma Smart (1992), is the story of an English child-prodigy mathematician who is the book's title character. On a visit to New York, Emma meets a slippery character named Frank, who recruits her to work on a book project that turns out to be not quite what Emma anticipated. Treitel has written short stories published in the New Yorker magazine and various British "best-stories-of-the-year" anthologies. His published books also include a story collection about Israelis and Palestinians, Arafat's Elephant (2002), a novel, Freud's Alphabet (2003), dream-variations on Sigmund Freud's last year in 1939 London; and The Beijing of Possibilities (2009), a story sequence that unfolds in contemporary China.

Jonathan Treitel has received residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Ucross, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Blue Mountain Center, and the Rockefeller Center at Bellagio. He has lived in San Francisco, Tokyo, London, Paris, Jerusalem, Beijing, and New York.

Achievements

• Jonathan Treitel was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, in 2014 for The Shoe King of Shanghai. He won the 2015 V.S. Pritchett Story Award and was a finalist for the 2015 Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize for The Seduction of a Provincial Accountant and Year of the Panda respectively. The story The Human Phonograph won the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the 2016 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Beijing of Possibilities

    (Blending elements of the surreal with carefully observed ...)

    2009
  • The Red Cabbage Cafe

    (New Yorker Humphrey Veil, whose revolutionary zeal involv...)

    1990
  • Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao

    (China is the center of the world, and the center of China...)

    2020
  • Freud's Alphabet

    (At once a delightfully inventive chronicle of Freud's las...)

    2003
  • Emma Smart 1992
  • Arafat's Elephant 2002