Author Bios

Hernan Diaz was born in 1973 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and spent part of his childhood in Stockholm, Sweden, before emigrating to the United States, where he has spent most of his adult life. He earned his doctorate in comparative literature from New York University, and his scholarly training in literary theory and the traditions…

Maggie O’Farrell was born in 1972 in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, and spent her childhood moving between Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. Her early years were marked by a near-fatal illness at age eight — a viral encephalitis that left her temporarily unable to walk or talk, and which she has described as a formative encounter…

Tommy Orange was born in 1982 in Oakland, California, to a Cheyenne and Arapaho father and a white mother. He grew up in Oakland, a city with one of the largest and most underrepresented urban Native American populations in the country, and attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where…

Anthony Doerr was born in 1973 in Cleveland, Ohio, and grew up in the American Midwest before studying history at Bowdoin College and later completing an MFA at Bowling Green State University. He has lived in Boise, Idaho, for much of his adult life, and his writing reflects a deep attentiveness to the natural world…

Matt Haig was born in 1975 in Sheffield, England, and grew up in the north of England before studying English and Politics at Hull University. In his late twenties he experienced a severe breakdown — a crisis of depression and anxiety so acute that he could not leave the house, stand on a cliff without…

Maggie O’Farrell was born in 1972 in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, and spent her childhood moving between Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. Her early years were marked by a near-fatal illness at age eight — a viral encephalitis that left her temporarily unable to walk or talk, and which she has described as a formative encounter…

R.F. Kuang was born in 1996 in Guangzhou, China, and moved to the United States as a young child, growing up in Dallas, Texas. She attended Georgetown University, where she studied Asian Security, then went on to earn a Master’s degree in China Studies from Oxford, an MPhil in Modern Chinese Studies, and is currently…

Hernan Diaz was born in 1973 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and spent part of his childhood in Sweden before his family settled in the United States. This itinerant upbringing informs much of his fiction, which is deeply interested in the unreliability of narrative, the way stories are constructed to serve power, and the silences that…

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was born in Stuttgart, in the Duchy of Württemberg, the son of a minor civil servant. A precocious student who was educated at the Tübingen Stift — a Protestant seminary where his dormitory-mates included Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich Hölderlin — Hegel came of age intellectually during the revolutionary decades at…

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was born in Messkirch, a small town in the Black Forest region of Baden, Germany, the son of a Catholic sexton and barrel-maker. He received an education initially intended to prepare him for the priesthood, studying at Jesuit schools before ill health interrupted his theological training and redirected him toward philosophy at…