Tara Isabella Burton

Tara Isabella Burton has followed a female hermit into the remote Caucasus, gotten love amulets from Turkish Islamic shamans, and held signs with the street preachers of Las Vegas. Her work on religion, culture, and place can be found at National Geographic, National Geographic Traveler, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, The Economist's 1843, Smithsonian, Hazlitt, Aeon, The BBC, The Atlantic, The American Interest, The Village Voice, Salon, The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Telegraph, and more. Her fiction has appeared at The New Yorker's Daily Shouts, Great Jones Street, Tor.com, PANK, Shimmer, and other places. She is the winner of The Spectator's 2012 Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing and a 2016 Lowell Thomas Award. Her first novel, Social Creature, is forthcoming from Doubleday in June 2018. Tara is also a Clarendon Scholar at Trinity College, Oxford, working on a doctorate in theology and fin de siècle French literature.