Tommy Orange’s first novel, entitled There There, was shortlisted for the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. It won the 2018 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize For A First Book By A New Voice and the 2019 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.

Orange holds an MFA degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts. He was born and raised in Oakland, California, the site of his novel, and he is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma.

Canadian writer Margaret Atwood praised his debut novel as “an astonishing literary debut.” Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad wrote this about the book:

“There There is a miraculous achievement, a book that wields ferocious honesty and originality in service of telling a story that needs to be told. This is a novel about what it means to inhabit a land both yours and stolen from you, to simultaneously contend with the weight of belonging and unbelonging. There is an organic power to this book — a revelatory, controlled chaos. Tommy Orange writes the way a storm makes landfall.”