Lara Palmqvist is a fiction writer, screenwriter, and literary critic.

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. Her screenwriting has also received awards from the Museum of the Moving Image and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for integrating factual science into timely and compelling stories. Her work was featured at the 2024 First Look international film festival in New York City, and in 2023 she was named a semifinalist for the Nicholl Fellowship, administered by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. As cited by Variety, her screenwriting has been called “original, poetic, and mythological yet grounded.”

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 2023 Goldenberg Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the 2023 Story Foundation 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 grateful 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 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. Formerly a Scientific Copyeditor for the University of Kansas Department of Geology, she currently serves as Assistant Editor for American Short Fiction.

She received her B.A. from St. Olaf College with double majors in biology and American studies. As a Rotary Global Grant Scholar, she earned her M.Th. in Religion in Peace and Conflict from Uppsala University in Sweden, specializing in ethically based peace and justice movements in relation to religious warfare. Originally from New Mexico, she now lives in Minnesota and Texas and received her MFA in fiction and screenwriting from the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin.