Peter Rock (born 1967) is an American novelist born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. His fiction often focuses on characters on the fringe of society.
Rock is a professor of creative writing at Reed College and lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and daughters.
Biography Rock attended Deep Springs College and received a BA in English from Yale University in 1991."Yale affiliates named 2014 Guggenheim Fellows," Yale News (April 14, 2014). He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at the Stanford Writing Program from 1995 to 1997. The manuscript for his novel This Is the Place won the Henfield Award in 1996.
In 2010, Rock's novel My Abandonment, based on a true story, received an Alex Award by the American Library Association. It also won the Utah Book AwardArave, Lynn. "Utah Book Award winners hailed," Deseret News (Oct 23, 2010). and was made into Debra Granik's 2018 film Leave No Trace, starring Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie. Rock was given a USC Scripter Award in 2010 for his role in the creation of the screenplay.
His short stories have appeared in Tin House, Zoetrope: All-Story, One Story, and other literary magazines. Many of these stories are compiled in The Unsettling (2006). His fiction and non-fiction have also appeared in the New York Times T Magazine. His novel, Passerthrough, was published in 2022. His most recent novel, Makeshift, was published in 2026.
He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1998 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. His novel The Night Swimmers was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Before joining Reed in 2001, he taught fiction at the University of Pennsylvania, at San Francisco State University, and at Yale University.
Books Makeshift (Soft Skull Press, 2026) Passersthrough (Penguin Random House, 2022) The Night Swimmers (Soho Press, 2019) Spells: A Novel Within Photographs (Counterpoint, April 2017) Klickitat (Harry N. Abrams, April 2016) The Shelter Cycle (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, April 2013) My Abandonment (Mariner Books, March 2009) The Unsettling (MP Publishing, 2006) The Bewildered (MacAdam/Cage, 2005) The Ambidextrist (Context Books, 2004) Carnival Wolves (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1998) This is the Place (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1997)
References
External links The Peter Rock Project - website dedicated to his work
Interview by Rachel Mercer for Bomblog regarding The Shelter Cycle Lyric essay about traveling to the location of Watership Down