Authors Bios

Deborah Eisenberg is a renown American short story writer. She has been awarded numerous awards for her work, including a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. She won the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for her book, The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. She teaches at the University of Virginia.

Jennifer Egan is both a journalist and a novelist. She was a 2001 National Book Award finalist for her novel Look at Me, and she won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Annie Proulx is the author of the short-story collection Heart Songs and Other Stories, and the novels Postcards, The Shipping News, Accordion Crimes, and That Old Ace in the Hole. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. She lives and writes in Wyoming.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer who moved to the United States at the age of 19. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book and her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, an historical fiction that is set during the Nigerian-Biafran War and tells the story of two sisters, won the 2007...

Chris Adrian is an overachiever with eclectic tastes. He published his first novel, Gob's Grief, in 2002, the same year he earned his medical degree. After completing his residency in pediatrics in San Francisco, he began a divinity degree at Harvard Divinity School. His second novel, The Children's Hospital, is an epic apocalyptic tale in which...

Nell Freudenberger graduated from Harvard in 2000 and published her first book, Lucky Girls in 2003. Freudenberger's first novel, The Dissident (2006) is about a Chinese performance artist and dissident who moves to Los Angeles to teach at a prestigious girls' school. In 2010, Freudenberger was named one of The New Yorker 's "20 Under 40"...

Don DeLillo is the American author of such acclaimed novels as Underworld, Libra, White Noise, and Point Omega. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Jerusalem Prize.

Rivka Galchen's dual background in science in literature (she holds a medical M.D. and an MFA) is reflected in Atmospheric Disturbances, her debut novel about a psychiatrist who finds his wife has been replaced by a doppelganger and one of his patients who believes he is receiving messages in code from the Royal Academy of Meteorology. In 2010,...

At the young age of 14, Nicole Krauss started writing, mostly poetry. At 28, she published her first novel, Man Walks Into a Room, which was followed by The History of Love and then Great House in 2010. Krauss is married to fellow-author, Jonathan Safran Foer. In 2010, she was selected as one of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" writers to watch.

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum has written short stories for the New Yorker and Tin House among other magazines. Her story "Accomplice" was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2004 and in the same year, her first novel, Madeleine is Sleeping, was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. In 2010, she...

Wells Tower has been awarded two Pushcart Prizes. His short story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (2009) was a finalist for The Story Pirze and was picked by Michiko Kakutani as one of her ten best books of 2009. In 2010, Tower was named one of The New Yorker magazine's list of the 20 best writers under 40.

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing, China. She moved to the United States in 1996 and pursued an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has published stories in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. Yiyun Li has won numerous awards for her short story collections. She teaches English at U.C. Davis and...

Anthony Doerr is an award-winning American writer whose short stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. His second story collection, Memory Wall, was selected as a finalist for the 2010 Story Prize.

Gary Shteyngart came from Leningrad (now St. Petersburg, Russia) to the United States at the age of seven, when his family moved to New York. He is the author of the novels The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Absurdistan, and Super Sad True Love Story.

Born in Yugoslavia and raised in Cyprus and Egypt (her family left Belgrade in 1992 when the war started), Tea Obreht came to the United States in 1997, at the age of 12. Obreht's debut novel, The Tiger's Wife (2011) was written largely while she was at Cornell. The book is about Natalia, a female narrator in the war-ravaged Balkans, and her...

Karen Russell, a graduate of Columbia University's MFA program, is known for short stories that have been featured in numerous publications and collections. Her debut short story collection, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves was published in September 2006 to great acclaim. Her debut novel is Swamplandia!

Since 1980, Julian Barnes has published a novel just about every two or three years. Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005) were all shortlisted for The Man Man Booker Prize. Julian Barnes won the Booker Prize with The Sense of an Ending in 2011.