Eva Hoffman

Eva Hoffman (born Ewa Wydra July 1, 1945, Cracow, Poland) is a writer and academic.

She was born in Poland after her Jewish parents survived the Holocaust by hiding in Ukraine. In 1959, during the Cold War, the thirteen year old Ewa, her nine year old sister "Alinka" and her parents immigrated to Vancouver, Canada, where her name was changed to Eva. Upon graduating from high school she received a scholarship and studied English literature at Rice University, Texas in 1966, the Yale School of Music (1967-68), and Harvard University, where she received a Ph.D. in English and American literature in 1974.

Eva Hoffmann has been a professor of literature and creative writing at various institutions, such as Columbia University, the University of Minnesota, Tufts, and CUNY's Hunter College. From 1979 to 1990, she worked as an editor and writer at The New York Times, serving as senior editor of “The Book Review” from 1987 to 1990. In 1990, she received the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1992, the Guggenheim Fellowship for General Nonfiction, as well as the Whiting Writers' Award. In 2000, Eva Hoffman was the Year 2000 Una Lecturer at the Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2008, she was awarded an honorary DLitt by the University of Warwick.

She now lives in London.

Her sister, Dr. Alina Wydra is a registered psychologist working in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Works

• Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language (1989)
• Exit into History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe (1993)
• Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (1997)
• The Secret (2002)
• After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (2004)
• Illuminations. A Novel (2008), US: Appassionata (2009)
• Time: Big Ideas, Small Books (2009)

External links

• Conversation with Eva Hoffman
• Hoffman's Tale
• Eva Hoffman, Una’s Lecturer 2000-2001