Credit Rose Callahan

Tara Isabella Burton has followed a female hermit into the remote Caucasus, gotten love amulets from Turkish Islamic shamans, and held signs with the street preachers of Las Vegas.

​Her first novel, Social Creature, praised by The New York Times' Janet Maslin as "a wicked original with echoes of the greats", was published by Doubleday (US) and Bloomsbury/Raven (UK) in June 2018. It was named a "book of the year" by The New York Times, New York's Vulture, and The Guardian, and has been shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award.

Tara completed a doctorate in theology as a Clarendon Scholar at Trinity College, Oxford.  Her next book, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless Age -- exploring the rites and practices of the religiously unaffiliated from SoulCycle to witchcraft -- will be published by Public Affairs in 2020. She currently writes a column on the same topic -- "Religion Remixed" -- for Religion News Service.

She has written on religion, culture, and place for National Geographic,  The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, The Economist's 1843, Aeon, The BBC, The Atlantic, The American Interest, Salon, The New Statesman, The Telegraph, as well as . for Vox, where she was a staff religion reporter. Her fiction has appeared in ​Granta, Volume 1 Brooklyn, The New Yorker's Daily Shouts, Tor.com, PANK, and more.

​She received a doctorate in theology from Trinity College, Oxford -- where she was a Clarendon Scholar -- in 2017.

Contact: ​Tara is represented by Emma Parry (US) & Rebecca Carter (UK) at Janklow & Nesbit Associates.