About Eva Hoffman

Eva Hoffman is a writer and academic. She was born Ewa Wydra July 1, 1945 in Cracow, Poland after her Jewish parents survived the Holocaust by hiding in the Ukraine. In 1959, during the Cold War, the thirteen years old Eva, her nine years old sister "Alinka" and her parents immigrated to Vancouver, Canada, where her name has been changed to Eva. Upon graduating from high school she received a scholarship and studied English literature at Rice University, Texas in 1966, the Yale School of Music (1967-68), and Harvard University, where she received a Ph.D. in English and American literature in 1974.

Eva Hoffmann has been a professor of literature and creative writing at various institutions, such as Columbia University, the University of Minnesota, and Tufts. From 1979 to 1990, she worked as an editor and writer at The New York Times, serving as senior editor of “The Book Review” from 1987 to 1990. In 1990, she received the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1992, the Guggenheim Fellowship for General Nonfiction, as well as the Whiting Writers' Award. In 2000, Eva Hoffman has been the Year 2000 Una Lecturer at the Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2008, she was awarded an honorary DLitt by the University of Warwick. Eva leads a seminar in memoir once every two years as a part of CUNY Hunter College's Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing.

She now lives in London.

Her sister, Dr. Alina Wydra is a registered psychologist working in Vancouver, British Columbia.