Krauss was born in New York City to an English mother and an American father who grew up partly in Israel. Krauss's maternal grandparents were born in Germany and Ukraine and later emigrated to London. Her paternal grandparents were born in Hungary and Slonim, Belarus, met in Israel, and later emigrated to New York. Many of these places are central to Krauss's 2005 novel, The History of Love, and the book is dedicated to her grandparents.

At the age of 14 Krauss became serious about writing. Until she began her first novel in 2002, Krauss wrote and published mainly poetry.

Krauss enrolled in Stanford University in 1992, and that fall she met Joseph Brodsky who worked closely with her on her poetry over the next three years. He also introduced her to such writers as Italo Calvino and Zbigniew Herbert, who would have a lasting influence. In 1999, three years after Brodsky died, Krauss produced a documentary about his work for BBC Radio 3, traveling to St. Petersburg where she stood in the "room and a half" where he grew up, made famous by his essay of that title. Krauss majored in English and graduated with Honors, winning a number of undergraduate prizes for her poetry as well as the Dean's Award for academic achievement. She also curated a reading series (with Fiona Maazel) at the Russian Samovar, a NYC restaurant co-founded by Brodsky.

In 1996, she was awarded a Marshall Scholarship and enrolled in a Masters program at Oxford University where she wrote her thesis about the American artist Joseph Cornell. During the second year of her scholarship she attended the Courtauld Institute in London, where she received a Masters in Art History, specializing in seventeenth-century Dutch art, and writing a thesis on Rembrandt.

In 2002, Krauss published her acclaimed first novel, Man Walks Into a Room. A meditation on memory and personal history, solitude and intimacy, the novel won praise from Susan Sontag and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. The movie rights to the novel were optioned by Richard Gere.

The History of Love was first published as an excerpt in The New Yorker in 2004, which sparked auctions among publishers worldwide, with Norton winning in America. The novel weaves together the stories of Leo Gursky, an 80-year-old Jewish survivor from Slonim, the young Alma Singer who is coping with the death of her father, and the story of a lost manuscript also called The History of Love. The novel was an international bestseller and won numerous awards. The book was optioned by Warner Brothers and is set to be directed by Alfonso Cuarón

In 2004, Krauss married the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. They live in Park Slope in Brooklyn, New York, and have two children.

Books

• Great House (2010)
• The History of Love (2005)
• Man Walks Into a Room (2002)

Short stories

• "The Young Painters", The New Yorker, 2010
• "From the Desk of Daniel Varsky", Harper's, 2007 (Included in Best American Short Stories 2008)
• "My Painter", Granta, 2007
• "The Last Words on Earth", The New Yorker, 2004
• "Future Emergencies", Esquire, 2002 (Included in Best American Short Stories 2003)