Author Bios

Douglas Stuart was born on November 26, 1976, in Glasgow, Scotland, and grew up in poverty in one of the city’s most deprived housing estates. His mother, Anne, was a charismatic and loving woman destroyed by alcoholism; she died of a drug overdose when Stuart was sixteen. After her death, Stuart supported himself through a…

Elena Ferrante is the pseudonym of an Italian novelist who has, since her debut in 1992, declined to reveal her identity, communicating with publishers, translators, and readers through written correspondence only. The sustained mystery of her identity is itself a literary and cultural statement: she has argued that a writer’s biography should be irrelevant to…

Jennifer Egan was born on September 7, 1962, in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in San Francisco. She studied English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where she was a Briggs-Copeland Fellow. After graduate school she lived in Italy, supported partly by a fellowship from the American Academy in…

Naomi Alderman was born in 1974 in London, England, and grew up in a Modern Orthodox Jewish household in Hendon, north London. This upbringing gave her deep familiarity with religious structure, gendered law, and the way institutions shape individual lives. She studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and completed an MA…

Becky Chambers was born in 1985 in Livermore, California, and grew up in a family that fostered in her a love of space exploration — her mother worked as a space mission designer for NASA. She studied theatre arts and worked in various arts administration roles before turning to fiction writing full time. She is…

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone are two of the most celebrated writers in contemporary speculative fiction, and This Is How You Lose the Time War (2019) represents their only collaborative work to date — a novel that reads as though it could only have been written by exactly this pair, at exactly this moment. El-Mohtar…

Haruki Murakami was born on January 12, 1949, in Kyoto, Japan, the son of two teachers of Japanese literature. He grew up in Kobe, and his childhood reading was predominantly Western: American crime fiction, European literature, and above all the Anglo-American pop music that was flooding Japanese youth culture in the 1960s. He studied theater…

Delia Owens was born on August 4, 1949, in Thomasville, Georgia, and grew up in rural Georgia with a deep love of the natural world that would define both her scientific career and her fiction. She studied zoology at the University of Georgia, where she earned her bachelor’s degree, and went on to complete a…

Susanna Clarke was born on November 1, 1959, in Nottingham, England, and grew up in various parts of northern England and Scotland as the daughter of a Methodist minister. She read history at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, graduating in 1981, and subsequently worked as a cookery book editor in Turin and as an English language…

Haruki Murakami was born on January 12, 1949, in Kyoto, Japan, the son of two teachers of Japanese literature. He grew up in Kobe, and his childhood reading was predominantly Western: American crime fiction, European literature, and above all the Anglo-American pop music that was flooding Japanese youth culture in the 1960s. He studied theater…