Lance Olsen

Lance Olsen (born October 14, 1956) is an American writer known for his experimental, lyrical, fragmentary, cross-genre narratives that question the limits of historical knowledge.

Lance Olsen was born in New Jersey.

He received a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1978, honors, Phi Beta Kappa), an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop (1980), and an M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) from the University of Virginia.

For ten years he taught as associate and then full professor at the University of Idaho; for two he directed the University of Idaho's M.F.A. program.

He has also taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Virginia, the University of Kentucky, on summer and semester-abroad programs in Oxford and London, on a Fulbright in Turku, Finland, and at various writing conferences.

He is a Guggenheim and a two-time N.E.A. fellowship recipient, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and was the governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence from 1996-1998.

His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, and his work has been translated into Arabic, Croatian, Finnish, German, Italian, Polish, and Turkish.

From 2002 to 2018, he served as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two, or FC2; founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America's best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities.

The hypermedial version of his novel 10:01, created in collaboration with artist Tim S. Guthrie, was published by the Iowa Review Web in 2005 and included in the Electronic Literature Organization Collection: Volume One.

Olsen is a regular participant in the biennial &NOW Festival, a celebration of experimental and innovative writing, and has collaborated with a board member of &NOW, Davis Schneiderman, on a series of short works.

In May 2022, Olsen was a fellow at The Rockefeller Bellagio Center on Lake Como, Italy.

From 2007 to 2023 he taught experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah.

He was fiction editor at Western Humanities Review from 2007 to 2013.

He was the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Berlin Prize in Fiction Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin from January through May 2013 and the Mellon International Visiting Senior Scholar at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, in October 2013.

From May 2015 through April 2016, Olsen was a guest at the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.

He served as Director of Creative Writing at the University of Utah from 2018 to 2019.

Olsen's wife is assemblage-artist Andi Olsen.

Olsen is author of seventeen novels, one hypermedia text, six nonfiction books, five short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and two anti-textbooks about experimental writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction.

His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Fiction International, Iowa Review, Village Voice, Time Out New York, BOMB, Hotel Amerika, and Best American Non-Required Reading.

He is known for his fictional biographies (examples of historiographic metafiction), such as Nietzsche's Kisses and Head in Flames, for which he does extensive historical research, as well as his work in avantpop, postmodernism, speculative fiction, experimental writing practices, and critifiction (the blending of theory and narrativity in a single text).

In the spring of 2018, Olsen taught a seminar on Experimental Forms and delivered two lectures as Chaire des Amériques at the Institut des Amériques de Rennes at the University of Rennes.