Tara Isabella Burton

Dr. Tara Isabella Burton is a novelist, essayist, and scholar of religion and spirituality. Her debut novel, 2018’s Social Creature, was named a “book of the year” by The New York Times, New York’s Vulture, and The Guardian.  Her second novel, The World Cannot Give, will be published by Simon & Schuster in March 2022.

Her first nonfiction book, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World (2020), was praised by Tim Shriver as “the most thoughtful analysis of our current spiritual crisis anywhere.” She is working on a history of self-creation, Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, to be published by Public Affairs in 2023.

Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, ​Granta, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and more. She is a columnist at Religion News Service and a Contributing Editor at American Purpose. She also co-writes the Substack newsletter “Line of Beauty” with her husband, Dhananjay Jagannathan.

​Tara received a doctorate in theology from Trinity College, Oxford, where she was a Clarendon Scholar, in 2017.