Gary Shteyngart (born Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart) is an American writer born in Leningrad, USSR. Much of his work is satirical.
Shteyngart immigrated to the United States in 1979 and was brought up in Queens, New York.
He is a graduate of Stuyvesant High School in New York City, and Oberlin College in Ohio, where he earned a degree in politics, in 1995, with a senior thesis on the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Moldova, and Tajikistan.
After Oberlin, he worked a series of jobs, as a writer, for non-profit organizations in New York. Shteyngart took a trip to Prague in the early 1990s, and this experience helped spawn his first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, set in the fictitious European city of Prava.
In 1999, as part of the application to Hunter College’s MFA program he mailed a portion of his first novel to Chang-Rae Lee, the director of the creative writing program at Hunter College. Lee helped Shteyngart get his first book deal. Shteyngart earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Shteyngart had a fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, for Fall 2007. He has taught writing at Hunter College, and currently teaches writing at Columbia University.
Shteyngart's novels include The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2002), and Absurdistan (2006), Super Sad True Love Story (2010).
Thirty-five years after he emigrated to the U.S., in January, 2014, Random House published Little Failure: A Memoir.
Shteyngart's work has received numerous awards.