Jake Lamar (born in 1961 in The Bronx, New York City) is an African-American writer, novelist, playwright, and cultural critic[1] living in Paris.[2]

Jake Lamar
Jake Lamar signing at the 7th Interpol'Art Festival in Reims , in October 2012.
Born	1961 The Bronx, New York City
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Harvard University
Website
jakelamar.com

After graduating from Harvard University, Lamar spent six years writing for Time magazine.[3] He has lived in Paris since 1993[4] and teaches creative writing at Sciences Po.[5] At age 28, he wrote his first autobiography, Bourgeois Blues, in which he evoked his relationship with his father. With it, he won the Lyndhurst Prize,[5] which convinced him to devote himself entirely to his passion for writing. In 1993, inspired by the American writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin, he moved to Paris in the 18th arrondissement, where he still resides. In 1996 he published The Last Integrationist, a satirical commentary of contemporary America, criticizing the pace of racial integration and the omnipresent television spectacle he sees as typical of the United States.[6] On March 29, 2015, two days after his 54th birthday, Lamar suffered a near-death experience as a victim of a near-fatal heart problem. After several months of convalescence in French hospitals, Lamar published an article in the Los Angeles Times reporting on the high quality and humanity of the socialist system of health care in France.[7] His most recent work, Viper's Dream (No Exit Press, 2023) is a hard-boiled crime novel set in the jazz world of Harlem between the years 1936 and 1961.[8] A version of Viper's Dream was broadcast (in French) as a 10-episode radio play in 2019. That production included many jazz tracks of the period. Viper's Dream was published in French as a novel by Rivages/Noir in 2021.

Fiction in English

• Bourgeois Blues (Summit Books 1991)[5]
• The Last Integrationist (Crown 1996)[5]
• Close to the Bone (Crown 1999)
• If 6 were 9 (Crown 2001)
• Ghosts of Saint-Michel (Minotaur 2006)
• Viper's Dream (No Exit Press 2023)

Fiction in French

• Le caméléon noir (Rivages/Noir 2003)
• Nous avions un rêve (Rivages/Noir 2005)
• New York Transfer (Biro 2007)
• Rendez-vous dans le 18ème (Rivages/Triller 2007)
• Postérité (Rivages 2014)
• Viper's Dream (Rivages/Noir 2021)

Plays

• Brothers in Exile
• Brothers in Exile (radio play)
• Viper's Dream (radio play)

Awards

• Lyndhurst Prize (for his first book, Bourgeois Blues)
• Centre National du Livre grant (for his novel Postérité)
• France’s Grand Prize for best foreign thriller (for his novel The Last Integrationist)
• Beaumarchais fellowship for his play Brothers in Exile

References

External links

• Jake Lamar Official Home Page