Teju Cole

Teju Cole
Name	Teju Cole
Birth name	Oluwatosin Oluwole Ajayi
Birth date	1975
Birth place	Kano State, Nigeria
Occupation	Writer, photographer, art historian
Nationality	Nigerian-American
Notable works	Every Day Is for the Thief, Open City, Tweeting as Performance

Teju Cole Teju Cole is a Nigerian-American novelist, photographer, and art historian known for intersectional work in literature, visual art, and criticism. His writing and photography have appeared in international publications and exhibitions, and he has taught and lectured at universities and cultural institutions across United States, United Kingdom, Nigeria, and Europe. Cole's practice engages urban space, memory, history, and aesthetics within global contexts such as Lagos, New York City, and Berlin.

Early life and education

Cole was born in Kano State and grew up in Lagos, where he attended schools connected to expatriate and Nigerian communities. He emigrated to the United States as a teenager and completed secondary education before matriculating at Amherst College, where he studied Comparative literature influences and mentored by faculty linked to Harvard University circuits. He undertook postgraduate study at Columbia University and studied art history and literature with scholars from institutions such as Yale University, Princeton University, University of Chicago, University of Oxford, and University of Cambridge. Cole later pursued doctoral work and research fellowships that placed him in programs associated with Barnard College, New York University, and museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art.

Career

Cole began publishing fiction and criticism in journals including Granta, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and The Guardian. He taught writing and visual studies at universities and led workshops connected to institutions such as Columbia University, Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, University of Toronto, and Yale School of Art. Cole has been a fellow and lecturer at organizations including the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Radcliffe Institute, American Academy in Berlin, Freud Museum, and cultural centers like the Serpentine Galleries and Haus der Kulturen der Welt. He has served on juries and advisory boards for prizes and festivals including the Man Booker Prize, PEN America, Turner Prize, Frieze Art Fair, and international film festivals in Cannes and Berlin International Film Festival.

Literary works

Cole's first book, a novella-length work originally published in Nigeria and later translated, explores return and urban observation and is often taught alongside texts by Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Wole Soyinka, and Ben Okri. His breakthrough novel, Open City, received critical attention in the same conversations as contemporary works by Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri, Don DeLillo, and Paul Auster. He has also published essays and criticism collected in volumes comparable with essays by Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Cole's shorter pieces have appeared in anthologies alongside writers such as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, J.M. Coetzee, V.S. Naipaul, and Isabel Allende.

Photography and visual art

Cole's photographic practice, often exhibited in galleries and museums, engages urban flânerie and cartographies of memory, placing him in visual conversations with photographers like Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. He has shown work at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Tate Modern, Het Nieuwe Instituut, National Museum of African Art, and independent spaces such as FACT Liverpool and the Stedelijk Museum. Cole has collaborated on projects with curators and artists from institutions like the Serpentine Galleries, Hayward Gallery, ICA London, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, and film and visual festivals such as Documenta, Venice Biennale, and Rotterdam International Film Festival.

Themes and influences

Cole's work addresses themes of urban solitude, migration, postcolonial memory, and ethical witnessing, linking to intellectual and artistic lineages that include Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Hannah Arendt. Literary influences and peers cited in discussion of his style include Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, and poets such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and John Ashbery. His photography and criticism engage contemporary debates in aesthetics associated with figures from Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida and intersect with discourses in art history represented by Linda Nochlin, Rosalind Krauss, and Griselda Pollock.

Awards and recognition

Cole has received prizes and nominations including the Internationaler Literaturpreis, longlist and shortlist placements for the Man Booker Prize, and awards from organizations such as PEN America, National Book Critics Circle, New York Public Library, and city cultural awards in Lagos and New York City. He has been granted fellowships by the American Academy in Berlin, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Guggenheim Foundation selection processes, and national arts councils in United Kingdom, United States, and Nigeria. Institutions such as Columbia University, Amherst College, and museums that have acquired or exhibited his work have recognized him through invited lectures, endowed chairs, and visiting scholar appointments.

Category:Nigerian novelists Category:Photographers