Bruce Holsinger is a novelist and literary scholar based in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of the USA Today and Los Angeles Times-bestselling novel The Gifted School (Riverhead Books, 2019). A Book of the Month Club main selection and described by The Wall Street Journal as "the novel that predicted the College Admissions Scandal," The Gifted School won the Colorado Book Award and was named one of the Best Books of 2019 by NPR and numerous publications. The novel is currently in development as a TV series with NBC/Universal Television. His most recent novel, The Displacements, received starred reviews from Booklist and Kirkus (which called it "brilliantly imagined and terrifyingly believable"), and was hailed by The New York Times as "hypnotic" and "a thorough translation to fiction of what it can feel like to live right now."  The novel one of the first three titles featured in "Read for Action," the humanitarian book club sponsored by the United Nations' Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. (Click here to listen to Bruce discuss the novel on NPR's Marketplace.)

​

He is also the author of A Burnable Book (2014) and The Invention of Fire (2015), award-winning historical novels published by William Morrow (HarperCollins). His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, Slate, and many other publications. His fiction has been featured several times on NPR (click here to listen to his interview with Robin Young of Here & Now and here for an interview about The Gifted School and the college admissions scandal with Renee Montagne of Weekend Edition). 

Since 2005 he has taught in the Department of English at the University of Virginia, where he specializes in medieval literature and modern critical thought and serves as editor of the quarterly journal New Literary History. His new nonfiction book, On Parchment: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age, was published by Yale University Press in 2023. His previous books have won major awards from the Modern Language Association, the Medieval Academy of America, and the American Musicological Society, and his academic work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. 

Bruce is represented by Helen Heller of the Helen Heller Agency and, for screen rights, Josie Freedman at CAA. For inquiries about publicity and appearances, please contact Shailyn Tavella, publicity manager at Riverhead Books.