20 Under 40: Young Shapers of the Future (Literature)
The future is unwritten. It is also right around the corner, and, if, as science fiction author William Gibson noted, it is not evenly distributed, more and more young people around the world are reaching toward it to shape it, improve it, and make it more equitable. These “shapers of the future” work in many fields and endeavors, embracing every corner and intersection of health and medicine, science and technology, and business and entrepreneurship. They are people of ideas, framing the intellectual questions and concerns that will guide future thought. They are scholars, builders, designers, architects, artists, teachers, writers, musicians, and social and political leaders. While under the age of 40 (as of January 2022), the 200 shapers of the future that we will highlight in this series have already left their mark on the present, and we expect to see much more invention, innovation, creation, and interpretation from them in times to come.
Ned Beauman (36)
London-born Ned Beauman is the author of four novels, each of them published to critical acclaim. Released in 2010, Boxer, Beetle, its protagonist a hapless Londoner with an unfortunate medical condition that lends him the smell of rotten fish, won The Guardian First Book Award, and its successor, The Teleportation Accident, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2012. Glow, published in 2014, updates the thriller for a new generation, its characters spread out over several continents but converging on a dentist’s office not far from Charing Cross. Published in 2017, his fourth novel, Madness Is Better Than Defeat, posits two competing expeditions to a Maya temple complex in Central America, one bent on dismantling a pyramid and sending it to New York. Beauman’s fascination for faux historical events that take improbable turns into the absurd have yielded some of the best novels in English in recent years. He also writes for the London Review of Books, Esquire, The New York Times, and other publications.
Gabriel Bergmoser (30)
Gabriel Bergmoser grew up in rural Australia and moved to Melbourne, the country’s second largest city, to attend secondary school and then university (La Trobe and the University of Melbourne). He cofounded a theater production company in 2013, finished a master’s degree in screenwriting at the Victorian College of Arts two years later, and wrote several plays, ranging from futuristic thrillers to light comedies, along with the hit Beatles-based play We Can Work It Out (2015), showcased at the Fringe Festival in Melbourne. He turned to books, writing a trilogy of young adult novels starring an adventurous young man named Boone Shepard. His first adult novel, The Hunted, appeared in 2018. It follows the harrowing trail of a young man and woman who, hiking in the outback of a “country of tough extremes that had never truly been tamed,” are menaced by the members of an isolated rural community. A film version is now being made, even as Bergmoser has returned to young adult territory with his next novel, to be followed by a sequel to The Hunted as another exercise in what Australian critics call “outback noir.”
Carlos Fonseca (34)
Carlos Fonseca Suárez was born in San Juan, Costa Rica, and lived there and in Puerto Rico. He received a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from Stanford University in 2009 and a doctorate in Latin American literature and culture from Princeton University in 2015. He went on to become a lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge. His work explores the intersection of literature with art and philosophy. A book of essays on international writers, La lucidez del miope (“The Lucidity of the Myope”), won one of Costa Rica’s National Prizes for Culture for 2017, whereas another monograph, The Literature of Catastrophe: Nature, Disaster and Revolution in Latin America, was published in 2020. In Latin America, however, he is better known as a novelist, one whose Colonel Lágrimas (2016) squarely places Latin American intellectual history within that of the world and whose Natural History (2020) is an elegant meditation on concealment, camouflage, and anonymity. He is widely recognized as one of the most inventive writers at work in the Spanish language today.
Alisa Ganieva (36)
Born in 1985 in Moscow, Alisa Ganieva grew up in her ancestral Dagestan, the Caucasus Mountains homeland of the Avar people. Beginning with the publication of her novella Salam, Dalgat! in 2009, she has emerged as the foremost Dagestani writer of the modern era. That novella, at first published under the male pseudonym Gulla Khirachev, won the Debut Prize in Russia, and she has since received many other honors for her work, which has become known to English-language readers through the translation of her 2015 novel The Mountain and the Wall. In that novel, she writes movingly of Dagestani villagers who, under the yoke of tsarist Russia and then the Soviet Union, had suffered an “erosion of historical memory,” forgetting central elements of their cultural identity. Ganieva elaborates with a look into the distant past: “authoritarianism existed in Dagestan, but it was alongside a strange, almost pagan freedom, including freedom for women.” After graduating from Moscow’s Maxim Gorky Literary Institute, she became a literary critic for the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta. She was also part of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. In 2015 the British newspaper The Guardian listed her as one of the 30 most talented young people at work in Moscow.
Amanda Gorman (23)
Born in 1998 in Los Angeles, California, Amanda Gorman began writing poetry as a child. At the age of 16, she was named the city’s Youth Poet Laureate, and in 2015 she published her first collection of poems, The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough. Two years later she became National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States. She founded an organization called One Pen One Page to teach creative writing to underprivileged young people. A few months after graduating from Harvard University with a cum laude degree in sociology in 2020, she read her poem “The Hill We Climb,” which she composed for the event, at the inauguration of U.S. President Joe Biden on January 20, 2021. She thus became the youngest poet ever to read at an inauguration, and she and her work received international acclaim. Gorman has received other accolades since, and a $10,000 prize for the best original poem by a high-school student was established in her name. Her emergence as a writer has marked two rising trends: the resurgence of popular interest in poetry among young people and the advent of a new generation of young poets of color.
Isabella Hammad (30)
Born in London to a Palestinian immigrant family, Isabella Hammad grew up hearing stories of her family in the days before the British mandate and the creation of the State of Israel. “Even when I was a teenager,” she told Kirkus Reviews, “I knew that I would be a novelist.” She received a bachelor’s degree in English language and literature from the University of Oxford and won scholarships at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge. She took a master of fine arts degree in fiction writing at New York University, publishing stories in such journals as The Paris Review and, in 2019, winning the O. Henry Prize. That year she published her debut novel, The Parisian, which is based on the life of her great-grandfather and which afforded her the opportunity to travel to her parents’ home for research. She now lives in New York, where she is writing her second novel, one that she promises will be very different from her first.
Naoki Higashida (29)
Naoki Higashida, born in Kimitsu, Japan, was five years old when he was diagnosed as being severely autistic. “Upon hearing the words severe autism,” he writes, “you may imagine a person who cannot speak, cannot understand others’ feelings, and lacks imaginative abilities.” Higashida has amply demonstrated that these qualities do not apply to him, having written dozens of books, ranging from memoirs to fairy tales. One memoir, The Reason I Jump, was published when he was just 13 years old; it later became the foundation for a worldwide documentary on autism of the same name. In 2017 he published a second memoir, Fall Down 7 Times, Get Up 8, translated by the English novelist David Mitchell, who lives in Japan and whose own son is autistic. Higashida, who is nonspeaking, usually communicates by pointing to cards with hiragana and Latin characters. Mitchell explains in The Reason I Jump that Higashida is a person with severe autism who can write and, as he told Maclean’s, “a writer who happens to have autism.”
Hitomi Kanehara (38)
Born in Tokyo, Hitomi Kanehara emerged in the first years of the 21st century as a writer who gave voice to a psychologically beleaguered cohort of young Japanese who have been subjected to extreme stress by cultural demands for academic and professional success after the collapse of the Japanese “bubble” economy in the early 1990s. As a teenager, Kanehara attempted suicide and then dropped out of high school, although she attended seminars led by her father, a professor of literature and translator of children’s books. She made her literary debut with the 2003 novel Hebi ni piasu (Snakes and Earrings), the story of a lonely alcohol-addicted teenage girl who attempts to give meaning to her life through obsessive tattooing and body piercing. She won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s highest literary honor for emerging writers, for the novel, sharing the award with another young chronicler of disaffection, Risa Wataya. Kanehara has since written several other novels, including Asshu beibī (2004; Ash Baby), Mazāzu (2011; Mothers), and Mariāju, mariāju (2012; Marriage, Marriage), that continue to explore themes of alienation and isolation.
Édouard Louis (29)
“From my childhood I have no happy memories,” writes Édouard Louis, born Eddy Bellegueule in the northern French village of Hallencourt into an impoverished family. His 2014 roman à clef En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, published in English in 2017 as The End of Eddy, recounts a miserable childhood among drug- and alcohol-addicted abusive parents and neighboring children who tormented young Eddy for being gay. He attended the prestigious École Normale Supérieure and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the first in his family to go to college, and became an acolyte of the sociologist, writer, and public intellectual Didier Eribon, who encouraged Eddy, now formally named Édouard Louis, to write. Like a latter-day Zola, he published two autobiographical novels that explore the lives of working-class people. He also became a critic of the French government, supporting the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) demonstrators of 2018 and beyond and excoriating a political system that, he holds, “is controlled by those who are least affected by politics.”
Valeria Luiselli (38)
A native of Mexico City, Valeria Luiselli ranges from audacious magic realism to hard-edged journalism and essays. Sometimes these qualities reverse, with ethereal essays and straightforward fiction that is almost a work of advocacy, in keeping with her interest in philosophy and sociology. Luiselli moved at the age of two to Madison, Wisconsin, and then, when her father entered Mexico’s diplomatic corps, she lived in South Korea, India, and South Africa before returning to her homeland. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 2008, she continued her peripatetic ways, although, as she told The Guardian, “I think, eventually, I will return [to Mexico].” She now teaches at Bard College in New York. Her most recent novel, Lost Children Archive (2019), the first that she wrote in English, explores the fates of young people separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border and in the United States without documentation. She was named a MacArthur fellow in 2019.
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Dara McAnulty (17)
Dara McAnulty was raised in County Fermanagh, in the southwest of Northern Ireland, in unusual circumstances: he, his brother, his sister, and his mother are all autistic, while his father, a conservation biologist, is the only one in the family without the condition. Sharing his father’s connection to the natural world, Dara, an accomplished study of natural history and ecology, began writing a nature blog at the age of 12. He employs an appropriate metaphor for the family: “We’re as close as otters, and huddled together, we make our way in the world.” Inspired by the corpus of punk rock music beloved of his parents and his own attachment to the poetry of Seamus Heaney, at the age of 16 Dara published Diary of a Young Naturalist (2020), a book that, throughout the United Kingdom, has been selling as fast as it can be put on the shelf. The diary records a year’s worth of close observations of nature from his 14th to 15th birthday, when the McAnulty family moved to the southeast of Northern Ireland, in the Mourne Mountains of County Down, where Dara was challenged to work in an unfamiliar landscape and apply his skills to a new environment.
Téa Obreht (36)
Born Tea Bajraktarević in Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia and is now independent Serbia, Téa Obreht left the country with her mother at the outbreak of the civil war of the early 1990s and moved first to Cyprus and then to Cairo, Egypt. In 1997 they immigrated to the United States, living first in Atlanta and then in Palo Alto, California. She took her maternal grandfather’s surname in 2006, while a student at the University of Southern California. She had been writing all along, but, after receiving a master of fine arts degree from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, she began to compose fiction in earnest, placing stories in magazines such as The New Yorker and, at 25, winning the Orange Prize. In 2011 she published her debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, which caused Time magazine to remark, “Not since Zadie Smith has a young writer arrived with such power and grace.” In 2019 her sophomore novel, Inland, arrived. It is an elegantly written tale of frontier life in late 19th-century Arizona and of the immigrants who settled there. She holds that novels deal with three themes: love, loyalty, and death.
Mónica Ojeda (34)
Mónica Ojeda was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, in 1988, and she studied at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. Always interested in writing, she turned her literary efforts to a genre that has not often been explored in South American literary fiction: horror. Her third novel, Mandíbula (Jawbone), was published in 2018, with one of her characters making a suitably eerie proclamation: “Cosmic horror has no face.” She has also published two collections of poetry. Named in 2017 one of the most promising writers in Latin America as one of the Bogotá 39, whose work was gathered in an anthology of that name, Ojeda took the occasion to describe the difficulty of writing in countries with few public libraries and with bookstores that clustered only in capital cities and other major urban areas. Ojeda now lives in Madrid, Spain, where she is studying humanities. Her collection of short stories, Las voladoras (2020; The Flyers), is a masterwork of what has been called “Andean Gothic,” a blend of horror traditions that reach from Internet memes to folktales.
Helen Oyeyemi (37)
Born in 1984 in Ibadan, Nigeria, Helen Oyeyemi was four when her family moved to Lewisham, a district in southeastern London, where she grew up. In her last year at a Roman Catholic high school, she wrote her first novel while studying for her final examinations. Published in 2005 as The Icarus Girl, it can be read as a kind of roman à clef intercut with scenes of magic realism—and even a little horror. Oyeyemi went on to study at the University of Cambridge, where she wrote (and produced) plays as well as a second novel, The Opposite House (2007), whose protagonist undergoes a crisis of faith. Mr. Fox, her 2011 novel, returned to the realm of horror, this time in the form of a story of a man’s devotion to a muse who inspires him to write grisly tales of murder, mostly of women. It was followed by Boy, Snow, Bird (2014), which Oyeyemi described to The Guardian as a “wicked stepmother story,” adding that every such story is really about “the way women disappoint each other.” Often compared to the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson, Oyeyemi’s works include ghosts, hallucinations, witches, and vampires, all to eminently entertaining effect and all with a feminist edge—though, as she also told The Guardian, “my feminism has never been against men. It’s not erasure; it’s just they’re not the focus.” She now lives in Prague.
Maria Popova (37)
When she was growing up in Bulgaria, Maria Popova was encouraged by her grandparents to delve into the encyclopedias they cherished. She did, and, when she moved to the United States to attend the University of Pennsylvania, she brought along her love of what she called “an interesting model of learning about the world serendipitously and also guidedely.”While working at a Philadelphia advertising agency, she began to write a daily memorandum to her colleagues on all sorts of random matters, from poetry to biology, history, and art. That memorandum evolved into a newsletter and, despite her mistrust of the “presentism” of the Internet, a phenomenally popular Web site called Brain Pickings. There, from one day to the next, one will find Popova’s deeply learned musings on a world of subjects—in one typical week, writing of books about interconnectedness, sexuality in the age of COVID-19, mountain climbing, and leadership. Brain Pickings is now part of the permanent Web archive of the Library of Congress, and in 2019 the polymathic Popova published her first book, Figuring, celebrating the life of the mind.
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld (30)
In 2020 Marieke Lucas Rijneveld won the International Booker Prize for their debut novel, The Discomfort of Evening. Rijneveld was the youngest winner in the history of the prize and the third Dutch author ever to be nominated. Hailed as a masterwork of psychological fiction, the novel explores the effects of a beloved older brother’s death on a 10-year-old girl whose family—religious dairy farmers who live in rural Holland—descends into a kind of grief-induced madness. It is a roman à clef par excellence, for Rijneveld was born in Nieuwendijk, a rural town in the province of North Brabant, into a family devoted to the Dutch Reformed religious tradition and who lost a young son. Rijneveld began to write at an early age, taking a masculine middle name as a teenager to indicate their nonbinary status and as a rebuke to classmates who had bullied them in school. Rijneveld is also a published poet who made news in 2021 when, asked to translate the work of Amanda Gorman from English into Dutch, withdrew when criticism arose that the job should have gone to a Black Dutch writer, even though Gorman had personally picked Rijneveld. Rijneveld lives in Utrecht but works part-time on a dairy farm outside the city.
Sally Rooney (30)
Born in Castlebar, the seat of County Mayo in western Ireland, Sally Rooney grew up in an artistic household. She earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Trinity College Dublin, studying English and American literature while a member of the school’s debate team. A writer since her early teens, Rooney published her first novel, Conversations with Friends, in 2017. Its protagonist, like Rooney a self-professed Marxist, struggles to find peace in a commercialized world after a fraught childhood in the home of an alcoholic father and codependent mother. Her 2019 novel, Normal People, concerns a young couple who are anything but normal: both are brilliant, one popular and the other shy and withdrawn. A winner of the Costa Book Award, it was made into a popular television series in a partnership with the BBC and Hulu, a partnership that is slated to continue with an adaptation of Rooney’s first book. In 2021 Rooney published her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, which combines the interests of her first two books—young love, spiritual confusion, and a repudiation of cultural decadence—in a complex story of love tinged with religious renewal as well as the author’s considerable good humor; as one of its lead characters says, “Humanity on the cusp of extinction, here I am writing another email about sex and friendship. What else is there to live for?” Apart from novels, Rooney has also published essays, short stories, and poems.
Joyful Clemantine Wamariya (33)
When she was a girl growing up in Rwanda, Joyful Clemantine Wamariya was endlessly curious about the people her parents would welcome into their home: travelers, neighbors, and strangers alike. That hospitality was foreclosed when, in 1994, six-year-old Joyful Clemantine, a member of the Tutsi ethnic minority, was forced to flee when a genocidal civil war erupted. With her 15-year-old sister, she went across the border to neighboring Burundi and then, as the violence spilled over into that country, embarked on a six-year journey, mostly on foot, across the continent all the way to South Africa. They were granted asylum by the U.S. government, and Wamariya attended high school in a Chicago suburb before entering Yale University. She is now a human rights advocate. She wrote (with Elizabeth Weil) the affecting memoir The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After (2018), in which she explains the effects of her childhood trauma: “You, as a person, are emptied and flattened, and that violence, that theft, keeps you from embodying a life that feels like your own.”
Xiaowei R. Wang (35)
Born in China, Xiaowei Wang came to the United States at the age of four with their parents and settled near Boston. In elementary school Wang became fascinated by computers—and much else besides. After winning a scholarship to Harvard College, they embarked on studies of art, technology, geography, ecology, and language. The result was two degrees, a bachelor’s in 2008 and a master’s in 2013 from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Wang’s central theme is “what it means to live in an age of technological anxiety.” Now a specialist in data visualization, they are the creative director of Logic magazine. Wang frequently returns to China to report on the “chinternet,” or Chinese internet, and other aspects of technology. They have also done fieldwork in Mongolia, Finland, and other nations. Wang’s first book, Blockchain Chicken Farm (2020), examines the effects of technology on rural China, which lags far behind urban centers and indicates, as they told Radii, that “China is not a monolith.”
Risa Wataya (37)
Risa Wataya is one of modern Japan’s most popular novelists. Born in Kyōto, she grew up in what has been called the “recession generation,” somewhere between the tradition-minded conservatism of older Japanese and the consumerism of younger ones. Her depiction of the travails of her cohort in her debut novel, Insutōru (”Install”), published in 2001, when she was only 17 years old, won her the Bungei literary prize. She followed it with Keritai senaka (I Want to Kick You in the Back) in 2003, winning the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, at 19 the youngest person ever to do so. She shared the award with Hitomi Kanehara, herself just 20, stirring some controversy among critics who held that these and other young writers were overstating the emptiness of post–bubble Japanese society in a time of economic duress. Wataya published three more novels, the most recent of which, Kawaisōda ne? (roughly, “I’m Sorry, No?”) won another prestigious award, the Ōe Kenzaburō Prize, in 2012.