Luc Sante (born May 25, 1954) is a writer and critic. Born in Verviers, Belgium, Sante emigrated to the United States in the early 1960s. He attended school in New York City, first at Regis High School in Manhattan and later at Columbia University from 1972 to 1976; due to several incompletes and outstanding library fines, he did not take a degree. Since 1984 he has been a full-time writer. Sante is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, where he worked first in the mailroom and then as assistant to editor Barbara Epstein. Sante has written on the subjects of film, art, photography, and miscellaneous cultural phenomena as well as book reviews.His books include Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (1991), Evidence (1992), the autobiographical The Factory of Facts (1998), Walker Evans (1999), Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005 (2007), and Folk Photography (2009). He co-edited, with the writer, his former wife, Melissa Holbrook Pierson, O. K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors (1998), and translated and edited Félix Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines (2007) for the New York Review Books (NYRB) series. In the early 1980s, he wrote lyrics for the New York City-based band The Del-Byzanteens.Sante received a Whiting Writer's Award in 1989, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992-93, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1997, a Grammy for album notes in 1998 (Sante was one of the album note writers for the 1997 re-issue of the Anthology of American Folk Music), and an Infinity Award for writing from the International Center of Photography in 2010. Having previously taught in the Columbia MFA writing program, Sante currently lives in Ulster County, New York and teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.
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