About the Author
Brian Duren left the University of Minnesota when he was an undergraduate, bought a one-way ticket to England, and sailed from New York to Southampton on a cargo ship. He spent nearly a year in Europe, most of that time in Paris (he lived for over a month in Shakespeare & Company Bookstore, just a stone’s throw from Notre Dame), and fell in love with French literature. Over the next several years he traveled extensively in the United States and Europe, lived for four years in France, and earned some degrees along the way: a doctorate in French literature from the University of Paris, a B.A. in English and a Ph.D. in French from the University of Minnesota.
Brian taught at the Universities of Texas, Tulsa, Iowa, and Minnesota. Among his most popular courses were those on Proust, literature and psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and European film. He eventually left teaching, became an administrator at the University of Minnesota, and then retired in 2004 to devote more time to writing and to his three sons. Since 2005 he has been teaching French on a part-time basis at colleges in Minnesota, such as Gustavus Adolphus.
While working as an Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Brian wrote his first novel, Fadings. Two chapters from the novel appeared in Rampike (volume 6, no. 1) in 1987.
In 2009, Brian published Whiteout, which won the Independent Publisher Association's Gold Medal for Midwestern Fiction and the Reader Views Reviewers Choice Award for Midwestern Literature, and finished a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Fiction. Judges reviewing entries in 2010 for the Ben Franklin Award for Popular Fiction ranked Whiteout fourth. Mary Ann Grossmann, book critic of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, wrote in her review that "Whiteout" is a stunning debut novel, worthy of national recognition . . ."
Brian is completing his next novel, Every Tom, Dick, and Harry. See "Work in Progress" for more information.
This photograph was taken just a few weeks before Brian moved to France to do a doctorate in French literature at the University of Paris. After finishing his dissertation (Proust et l'écriture du désir), he accepted a position teaching at the University of Texas.