Lara Palmqvist is a New Mexican fiction writer and screenwriter currently based in the Great Lakes region of the United States. As cited by Variety, her work has been called “attentive, original, poetic, and mythological yet grounded.”

Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Southern Indiana Review, Chicago Review of Books, The Southampton Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Sycamore Review, McNeese Review, Ploughshares, Mid-American Review, and Witness, among other publications.

As a screenwriter, her work has been awarded a Humanitas Prize for exploring the human condition in a nuanced and meaningful way, as well as the Discovery Prize from the Museum of the Moving Image and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for integrating factual science into timely and compelling stories. She was a semifinalist for the 2023 Nicholl Fellowship, administered by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and in 2024 her work was featured at the First Look international film festival in New York City. She is currently a 2024-2025 SFFILM Sloan Science in Cinema Fellow.

Her fiction has received grants and awards from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the James Kirkwood Literary Prizes of UCLA, Marble House Project, Ox-Bow School of Art, the Saari Residence in Finland, the Svalbard Galleri in Norway, and the Sozopol Fiction Seminars in Bulgaria. She is the winner of the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction and a finalist for the Story Foundation Prize and the Jesmyn Ward Fiction Prize. In 2024, her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won the Fania Kruger Fellowship, which honors writers whose work is characterized by a vision of social justice.

Palmqvist is the recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation REU Program, through which she researched native pollinators in farmland corridors, and the U.S. Fulbright Commission, through which she taught graduate-level creative writing at the Ivan Franko National University and Chernivtsi National University in Ukraine. She’s worked in areas ranging from strawberry farming, to Earth science education, to researching honeybees in the Western Ghats mountains of India.

She holds degrees in biology and American studies, and she earned her MTh from Uppsala University in Sweden as a Rotary Global Grant Scholar, specializing in ethically based peace and justice movements in relation to religious warfare. She earned her MFA in fiction and screenwriting from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, where she was also named a Harry Ransom Center Research Fellow in the Humanities. She currently lives in Minnesota and serves as Assistant Editor for American Short Fiction.