Lauren Markham is a writer based in northern California.

A fiction writer, essayist and journalist, Lauren’s work most often concerns issues related to youth, migration, the environment and her home state of California. She is the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life, A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging (Riverhead, 2024) and Immemorial(Transit, 2025.)

The Far Away Brothers was awarded the 2018 Ridenhour Book Prize, the Northern California Book Award, and a California Book Award Silver Prize. It was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Selection, a New York Times Book Critics' Top Book of 2017, and was shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the L.A. Times Book Award and longlisted for a Pen America Literary Award in Biography. A Map of Future Ruins was named a finalist for the California Book Award, The Northern California Book Award, and the runner up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her most recent book, Immemorial, was longlisted for the Pen America Jean Stein Award.

She has reported a range of stories all over the world, including the border regions of Greece and Mexico and Thailand and Texas; arctic Norway; gang-controlled regions of El Salvador; schools in North Slope of Alaska; depopulating towns in rural Sardinia and rural Guatemala, too; home school havens in southern California; imperiled forests in Oregon and Washington; the offices of overwhelmed immigration attorneys in L.A. and Tijuana; the parched olive groves of the Mediterranean; the upscale haunts of women scammed on the Upper East Side; and a war (and reconciliation) with the crows in Oakland, California.

Her writing has appeared in outlets such as VQR (where she is a contributing editor), Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The Believer, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Guernica, Freeman's, Mother Jones, Orion, The Atlantic, Lit Hub, California Sunday, Zyzzyva, The Georgia Review, The Best American Travel Writing 2019, and on This American Life. She has been awarded fellowships from The Mesa Refuge, UC Berkeley, Middlebury College, the McGraw Center, the French American Foundation, the Society for Environmental Journalists, the Silvers Prize, the de Groot Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. 

In addition to writing, Markham has spent nearly two decades working at the intersection of education and immigration. She regularly teaches writing in various community writing centers as well as the University of San Francisco and St. Mary’s MFA in Writing Programs, where she co-founded the Storyboard Residency with Chris Feliciano Arnold. She co-edits The Approach and is currently at work on Pageant, a novel about early California.

For updates, follow Lauren on Bluesky @laurenmarkham.bsky.social or Instagram @laurenemarkham