Amor Towles

Amor Towles is an American novelist, born in 1964 and raised in the Boston area. He graduated from Yale and took an MA in English at Stanford, where his thesis, a short story cycle called "The Temptations of Pleasure", appeared in The Paris Review in 1989. He worked as an investment professional for more than twenty years before turning to writing full time, and lives in Manhattan.

His first novel, Rules of Civility (2011), follows a young woman through one year of 1938 New York; its French translation won the 2012 Prix Fitzgerald. A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), about a Russian aristocrat sentenced to house arrest in a Moscow hotel, was a long-running New York Times bestseller and was adapted as a television series in 2024.

The Lincoln Highway (2021) is a road novel set in 1954. His story collection Table for Two (2024) gathers six stories and the novella Eve in Hollywood, which first appeared in 2013. He also wrote "You Have Arrived at Your Destination" for Amazon's Forward collection (2019).

Towles was guest editor of The Best Short Stories 2024: The O. Henry Prize Winners, and co-edited the 2023 volume of Best Crime Stories of the Year with Otto Penzler.