Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Allen Lethem was born in New York City on 19 February 1964; his father was Protestant, of Scottish and English ancestry, and his mother was Jewish, from a family with roots in Germany, Poland and Russia. He began in genre — his first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music (1994), crossed science fiction with detective fiction — and then wrote Motherless Brooklyn (1999), narrated by a detective with Tourette's syndrome, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the Gold Dagger for crime writing. The Fortress of Solitude followed in 2003. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005.