Alumna Lauren Wilkinson '13 Releases Debut Novel 'American Spy'

American Spy by writing alumna Lauren Wilkinson '13 comes out next week. Wilkinson was been called a writer to watch in 2019 by Publisher’s Weekly.

“Wilkinson’s unflinching, incendiary debut combines the espionage novels of John le Carré with the racial complexity of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. . . . [American Spy] is certain to make Wilkinson’s name as one of the most engaging and perceptive young writers working today. . . . As refreshing as it is revelatory.” —Publishers Weekly 

Wilkinson’s continent-hopping novel, American Spy (Random House, February 2019), sprung from a localized prompt. In a Columbia MFA workshop, the writer John Freeman asked Wilkinson to write a story about suburban unhappiness. “The craziest thing I could think of was a suburban mom—one who’s very traditional, but an assassin is coming for her,” she says. American Spy’s protagonist is a black FBI counterintelligence officer recruited in the late 1980s to infiltrate the inner circle of Thomas Sankara, the charismatic leftist president of Burkina Faso. Wilkinson, a 34-year-old New Yorker, was interested in exploring “whatever similarity existed in America between being black and being a spy,” she says. “The books that inspired me weren’t particularly spy novels—for example Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, where the grandfather says he’s a spy in the enemy’s country.”

“Echoing the stoic cynicism of Hurston and Ellison, and the verve of Conan Doyle, American Spy lays our complicities—political, racial, and sexual—bare. Packed with unforgettable characters, it’s a stunning book, timely as it is timeless.”—Paul Beatty, Man Booker Prizewinning author of The Sellout and faculty member at Columbia. 

Wilkinson earned an MFA in fiction and literary translation from Columbia University, and has taught writing at Columbia and the Fashion Institute of Technology. She was a 2013 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer’s Fellow, and has received support from both the MacDowell Colony and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Her fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Granta, The Believer, and The Millions, among other publications. American Spy, her first novel, is a Spring 2019 Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” pick. Lauren grew up in New York and lives on the Lower East Side.