Gish Jen grew up in New York, where she spoke more Yiddish than Chinese. She has been featured in a PBS American Masters program on the American novel. Her distinctions also include a National Endowme…
Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master…
Anna Marie Quindlen is an American author, journalist, and opinion columnist. Her New York Times column, Public and Private, won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992. She began her journalism care…
Chris Bohjalian is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 26 books. His new novel, THE AMATEUR, arrives on August 4, 2026. He writes literary fiction, historical fiction, thrillers, and (on occas…
Julie Otsuka is a Japanese American novelist and former painter known for her evocative, lyrical prose and her autoethnographic approach to historical fiction. Drawing deeply from her family's experie…
Carver was born into a poverty-stricken family at the tail-end of the Depression. He married at 19, started a series of menial jobs and his own career of 'full-time drinking as a serious pursuit', a c…
Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida. After graduating from the University of Florida, he joined the Miami Herald as a general assignment reporter and went on to work for the newspaper’s weekly…
George Saunders was born December 2, 1958 and raised on the south side of Chicago. In 1981 he received a B.S. in Geophysical Engineering from Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. He worked at…
Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first nov…
Roddy Doyle (Irish: Ruaidhrí Ó Dúill) is an Irish novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. Several of his books have been made into successful films, beginning with The Commitments in 1991. He won the Bo…
Gary Shteyngart is an American writer born in Leningrad, USSR (he alternately calls it "St. Leningrad" or "St. Leninsburg"). Much of his work is satirical and relies on the invention of elaborately fi…
Novels, including Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and nonfiction writings of American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston give detailed accounts of African American life in the South.
Elizabeth Strout is the author of several novels, including: Abide with Me, a national bestseller and BookSense pick, and Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for Fir…
Nnedi Okorafor is a New York Times Bestselling writer of science fiction and fantasy for both children and adults. The more specific terms for her works are africanfuturism and africanjujuism, both te…
Charlie Porter is a writer, fashion critic and curator. He has written for the Financial Times, the Guardian, The New York Times, GQ, Luncheon, i-D and Fantastic Man, and has been described as one of …
Josh Rountree is a novelist and short story writer who works across multiple genres, focusing mostly on horror and dark fantasy. His novel The Legend of Charlie Fish was released by Tachyon Publicatio…
Nathaniel Read “Nate” Silver (born January 13, 1978) is an American statistician and writer who analyzes baseball and elections. He is currently the editor-in-chief of ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight blog and …
William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874. He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style.
Nghi Vo is the author of the acclaimed novellas The Empress of Salt and Fortune and When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain. Born in Illinois, she now lives on the shores of Lake Michigan. She believes …
Hi! I'm the author of MEMORY PIECE (Riverhead, March 2024) and THE LEAVERS (Algonquin, May 2017). THE LEAVERS was a national bestseller that won the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction a…
Hi! I was born and grew up in Singapore, and now live in New York. I have a BA in history from Yale University, a JD from the New York University School of Law, and a fiction MFA from Brooklyn College…
Born in Taipei, Lisa Hsiao Chen received a 2018 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, and was previously an emerging fiction fellow at the Center for Fiction and a resident at the Lower Manhattan Cult…
