Author Bios

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…

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born on March 13, 1971, in Ban Me Thuot, Vietnam, and fled the country with his family as a refugee in 1975, at the age of four, following the fall of Saigon. His family was separated during the resettlement process, with his parents sent to a Pennsylvania sponsor family while he…

Chloe Ardelia Wofford, who wrote under the name Toni Morrison, was born on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, the second of four children of George Wofford, a shipyard welder, and Ramah Willis Wofford. She grew up in a working-class family in which African American cultural traditions — storytelling, music, community — were lived realities…

Sally Rooney was born in 1991 in Castlebar, County Mayo, Ireland, and grew up in a household shaped by left-wing politics and a deep love of literature. She studied English at Trinity College Dublin, where she became one of the most successful competitive debaters in European history, representing Ireland internationally. That background in argument, dialectic,…

Ocean Vuong was born on October 14, 1988, in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and came to the United States at the age of two as a refugee with his mother and grandmother, settling in Hartford, Connecticut. His family was largely illiterate in Vietnamese, let alone English, and Vuong did not learn to read until…

Min Jin Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1968, and immigrated to the United States at the age of seven, settling in Queens, New York, where her parents ran a jewelry store. Her experience of the Korean immigrant community — its codes of industry and respectability, its complex relationship with both Korean tradition…

Milan Kundera was born on April 1, 1929, in Brno, Czechoslovakia, the son of a noted pianist and musicologist. He grew up in a household where music was central, and music — its structures, its relationship to time and memory — would remain a persistent presence in his fiction throughout his career. He joined the…

Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was born on May 15, 1891, in Kyiv, then part of the Russian Empire, the eldest of seven children of a theology professor. He studied and practiced medicine before abandoning it entirely in 1920 to devote himself to writing, a decision made when the possibilities for Soviet literary freedom still seemed briefly…

Michael Cunningham was born on November 6, 1952, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in Pasadena, California. He attended Stanford University and later earned an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he worked under John Irving and Vance Bourjaily. His early career was marked by patient development — years of publishing short…

Marilynne Robinson was born on November 26, 1943, in Sandpoint, Idaho, and grew up in a small Pacific Northwest town in a Protestant household whose religious culture shaped both her moral sensibility and her literary style. She attended Brown University, where she studied the English Renaissance, and earned her PhD from the University of Washington….