Lucy Sante is a Belgian-born American writer, critic, artist, and one of the most distinctive cultural voices of her generation, known for her ability to illuminate hidden histories and overlooked details with precision, empathy, and wit. A longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books, she has written influential works that move effortlessly between social history, memoir, photography, music, and film, including the landmark Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York and later books such as The Other Paris, Nineteen Reservoirs, and Maybe the People Would Be the Times. Born in Verviers, Belgium, and raised in the United States, Sante’s career has unfolded across many disciplines, from writing lyrics for the Del-Byzanteens and consulting on Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York to exhibiting her own collages and teaching generations of writers and photographers at Bard College. Across her work, she has shown a rare talent for connecting personal memory with collective experience, often focusing on marginal spaces, vanished worlds, and the quiet poetry of everyday life.
Her writing is marked by intellectual rigor as well as a deep affection for the strange, the forgotten, and the unfashionable. She has also played an important role as a cultural translator, bringing overlooked voices and images into sharper focus through editing, translation, and critical commentary. As a teacher, she influenced countless students by encouraging attentiveness, curiosity, and ethical engagement with history and images. Her contributions have been recognized with numerous honors, including a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Grammy for album notes, and prestigious fellowships from institutions such as the MacDowell Colony and the New York Public Library. In recent years, her work has taken on an especially intimate and resonant dimension with I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, a candid and beautifully crafted account of coming out and transitioning later in life, a book widely praised for its honesty and literary grace, named one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2024 and shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. This interview explores Lucy Sante’s life, work, and evolving sense of self, as well as the curiosity and courage that continue to shape her remarkable journey.
