Rivka Galchen

Rivka Galchen
Born	April 19, 1976 Toronto, Canada
Notable works	Atmospheric Disturbances (2009)
Notable awards	William J. Saroyan International Prize for Fiction

Rivka Galchen (born April 19, 1976) is a Canadian-American writer. Her first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, was published in 2008 and was awarded the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.

Galchen was born in Toronto, Canada. When she was an infant, her parents relocated to the United States, where she has lived ever since. She lived in Norman, Oklahoma from 1981 to 1994, where her father, Tzvi Gal-Chen, was a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma and her mother was a computer programmer at the National Severe Storms Laboratory. Her parents, of Jewish descent, emigrated from Israel before her birth.

In 1994 Galchen began attending Princeton University, where she was an English major. In her sophomore year, she applied to an early-admissions program at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She received her M.D. from Mount Sinai in 2003, with a focus in psychiatry. After medical school, she received an MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Robert Bingham fellow. She was a 2006 recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for women writers.

In early 2011, Galchen served as the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fiction Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Galchen has written for several national magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, and The Believer.

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