Ken Kalfus (born April 9, 1954 in New York City) is an American author and journalist.

His first novel was The Commissariat of Enlightenment (2003), preceded by short story collections PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (1999) and Thirst (1998).

The title story is a novella, a thinly veiled fictionalization of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's alleged 2011 sexual assault on a maid in a midtown New York hotel suite.

In an interview in Bookslut, he told the critic Vladislav Davidzon "The news often feeds my imagination, which is why my fiction sometimes plays off topical or historical events...."[5] The 2007 HBO movie Pu-239 was based on his short story of the same name.

[6] He is married to Inga Saffron, Pulitzer-winning architecture critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer,[7] with whom he has a daughter, Sky.