Brandon Taylor (born June 1, 1989) is an American writer. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Iowa and has received several fellowships for his writing. His short stories and essays have been published in many outlets and have received critical acclaim. His debut novel, Real Life, came out in 2020 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2022, Taylor's Filthy Animals won The Story Prize awarded annually to collections of short fiction. Early life and education Taylor was born in Prattville, Alabama, and grew up in a small community outside Montgomery. Part of Taylor's upbringing was spent in a very religious, conservative Baptist setting. Taylor attended Auburn University Montgomery for his undergraduate studies, and then joined a graduate biochemistry program, and after leaving in 2016 began a career in creative writing. He earned graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Career Taylor's short stories and essays have appeared in Guernica, American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, Buzzfeed Reader, O: The Oprah Magazine, Gay Mag, The New Yorker, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. He is the senior editor of Electric Literatures "Recommended Reading". He is also a staff writer at Literary Hub. In an interview for the Booker Prizes, Taylor said his influences were Mavis Gallant, André Aciman, Jane Austen, Alice Munro, Louise Glück, Elizabeth Bishop, Hilton Als, Pat Conroy and Ann Petry. He received a fellowship from the Lambda Literary Foundation in 2017. He has also received fellowships for his writing from Kimbilio Fiction and the Tin House Summer Writer's Workshop. His debut novel, Real Life, was published in 2020 with Riverhead Books. In 2021, a collection of his stories, Filthy Animals, was published by Penguin/Random House. Taylor's upcoming projects as of 2020 include a second novel titled Group Show. Real Life Taylor wrote his debut novel, Real Life, in less than five weeks, and he later explained his approach: "I was like, I’m going to sit down and knock this out so I can get on with my life.... Writing a novel ruins your life in really specific ways. Because you have to live inside of it. It’s just this sustained exercise in being miserable." It is "a campus novel imagined from the vantage of a character who is usually shunted to the sidelines ...