Anna Della Subin writes about sleepwalkers, grave worship, imperial Ethiopian court etiquette, visions of the flood, thirteenth-century oculists, occultists, cricket, ritualized mutiny, Dr. Death's childhood, dreams of 9/11, the politics of the afterlife, 300-year naps.
Accidental Gods, a history of men inadvertently turned into deities, is out now from Metropolitan Books in the US and Granta in the UK. It was named a Book of the Year in The TLS, Esquire, The Telegraph, and the Irish Times, an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times, and was shortlisted for English PEN’s 2023 Hessell-Tiltman Prize for the best non-fiction on any historical subject. In 2022, Anna Della was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers by Prospect Magazine.
Her work, often at the intersection of politics, religion and myth, has appeared in the London Review of Books, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The TLS, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian Long Read, Frieze, Granta, and The Paris Review, on programs for the BBC, and in translation in several languages. Her book-length essay Not Dead But Sleeping was published by Triple Canopy in 2017.
She is a senior editor at Bidoun, the award-winning publishing and curatorial initiative focused on the Middle East and its diasporas. She is also a contributing editor at The Public Domain Review. Anna Della studied philosophy and classics at the University of Chicago and the history of religion at Harvard Divinity School. She lives in New York City.