William T. Vollmann

William T. Vollmann is an American novelist, essayist, journalist and war correspondent known for exceptionally ambitious works that combine historical research, imaginative fiction, travel writing and firsthand reportage. His writing repeatedly examines violence, colonialism, poverty, political ideology and the lives of people living at society’s margins. Vollmann’s stylistically experimental fiction ranges from contemporary urban narratives to large-scale reconstructions of historical conflict. His best-known novel, Europe Central, won the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction and interweaves the experiences of real and invented characters in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union before and during the Second World War.

Vollmann’s principal historical novels are the published volumes of Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes, a projected cycle about encounters between Indigenous peoples and European colonisers. The Ice-Shirt depicts Norse expansion into Greenland and Vinland; Fathers and Crows examines French Jesuit missions and conflicts involving the Huron and Iroquois; Argall revisits Pocahontas, John Smith and the founding of Jamestown; The Rifles reconstructs Sir John Franklin’s disastrous Arctic expedition; and The Dying Grass recounts the Nez Perce War of 1877, principally through General Oliver Otis Howard. Together with Europe Central, these are Vollmann’s clearest works of historical fiction; several of his story collections also contain historically situated narratives, but are not novels.