Alejandro Varela (writer)

Alejandro Varela (born 1979) is an American fiction writer. His novel The Town of Babylon was nominated for a National Book Award in 2022.

Career
Varela graduated from Cornell with a Bachelor of Arts and the University of Washington with a Masters in Public Health. After graduating, he worked on an HIV study for the New York City Blood Center and managed cancer screening studies at Mount Sinai in Manhattan. Varela taught graduate-level public health policy and advocacy at Long Island University before beginning to write full time. He has published short stories in The Yale Review, Georgia Review, and Harper's Magazine.

Varela was working in a skyscraper two blocks way from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. He detailed his experience on that day to Nicole Chung in The Atlantic, "I don’t know when the nightmares started, but after that, it was a long time before I could fly again."

Varela's debut novel, The Town of Babylon, was published in 2022 and shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction. The judges for the award said, "With this urgent, vivid novel, Varela has given us a modern classic and an indelible portrait of our times."

His second book, The People Who Report More Stress, a short story collection, was published in 2023. The New York Times called it "a master class in analyzing the unspoken... Varela illuminates our society’s Gordian knots with a seemingly effortless wit and empathy." The book was longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize.

Personal
Varela is queer and lives in New York City. His parents are from Colombia and El Salvador.