Author Bios

Abraham Verghese was born in 1955 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to parents who were schoolteachers from the Kerala region of India—a heritage that placed him at the intersection of multiple cultures and gave him the perspective of an outsider always searching for belonging. He completed his undergraduate education in Ethiopia before emigrating to the United…

Michelle Zauner was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1989, and moved with her family to Eugene, Oregon, as a young child. The daughter of a Korean mother and an American Jewish father, she grew up navigating the complex terrain between cultures—a negotiation that would become central to her artistic identity. She attended Bryn Mawr…

Erin Morgenstern was born in 1978 in Marshfield, Massachusetts, and grew up with an abiding love of art, magic, and the kind of elaborate, sensory worlds that seem to exist just at the edge of the real. She studied theater arts at Smith College, an education that imbued her work with a deep appreciation for…

Gabrielle Zevin was born in 1977 in New York City and grew up in Florida. She attended Harvard University, where she studied English and American literature, an education that gave her a deep grounding in literary tradition while nurturing an aesthetic sensibility capacious enough to embrace young adult fiction, literary novels, and genre-inflected work alike….

Emily St. John Mandel was born in 1979 and grew up on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada, in a rural setting far from literary centers—an upbringing that may have fostered the particular quality of solitude and longing that animates much of her fiction. She studied contemporary dance at The School of Toronto Dance…

Colson Whitehead was born in 1969 in New York City and grew up in Manhattan, where he developed an early and voracious love of reading that would set the course of his literary life. He attended Harvard University, graduating in 1991 with a degree in English literature. After college, he began his career as a…

Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was born on November 16, 1930, in Ogidi, a large village in southeastern Nigeria, the fifth of six children of Isaiah Okafor Achebe, a teacher in a missionary school, and Janet Iloegbunam. His upbringing was defined by the intersection of Igbo cultural tradition and Christian missionary education — a dual inheritance that…

Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, and grew up in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated all-Black municipality in the United States — a fact of extraordinary significance for her development as a writer. Growing up in a community governed and sustained by Black people, without the constant shadow of…

Yaa Gyasi was born in Mampong, Ghana, in 1989, and moved to the United States at the age of two when her father accepted a professorship at the University of Illinois. She grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, where her experience of the American South — its history of slavery and racial violence, its complex relationship…

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 22, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia, into one of the wealthiest and most distinguished aristocratic families in the country. His father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a prominent liberal politician and jurist; his mother was the daughter of a gold-mining millionaire. The family lived in extraordinary privilege — with…