Rachel Kadish is the award-winning author of the novels The Weight of Ink, From a Sealed Room, and Tolstoy Lied: a Love Story, as well as the novella I Was Here. Her work has appeared on NPR and in the New York Times, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Slate, and has been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and elsewhere.
Her most recent novel, The Weight of Ink, won a National Jewish Book Award and was a USA Today bestseller, a Ms. Magazine Bookmark Title, and an Amazon Best Book of 2017. Set in London in the mid-17th century and the early 21st century, this powerful novel is the interwoven tale of two women of remarkable intellect: Ester Velasquez, an immigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi just before the plague hits the city; and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history. Toni Morrison called Kadish, “A gifted writer, astonishingly adept at nuance, narration, and the politics of passion.”
She has been a fiction fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, has received the Association of Jewish Libraries Fiction Award and the John Gardner Fiction Award, and was the Koret Writer-in-Residence at Stanford University. She lives outside Boston and was recently named a spokesperson for “Artists for Understanding,” a White House initiative to combat hate and intolerance through the arts.
“A gifted writer, astonishingly adept at nuance, narration, and the politics of passion” — Toni Morrison
