Sigrid Nunez | |
|---|---|
 Nunez at the 2019 National Book Festival | |
| Born | 1951 (age 72–73) New York City, U.S. |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Barnard College (BA) Columbia University (MFA) |
| Notable awards | Whiting Award, Rome Prize, Berlin Prize, National Book Award, Guggenheim Fellowship |
Sigrid Nunez (born 1951) is an American writer, best known for her novels. Her seventh novel, The Friend , won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. [1]
Sigrid Nunez was born and raised in New York City, the daughter of a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father. She received her BA from Barnard College (1972) and her MFA from Columbia University (1975), after which she worked for a time as an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books . Nunez has published nine novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God,The Last of Her Kind, The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and, most recently, The Vulnerables. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag.
Among the journals to which Nunez has contributed are The New Yorker, The New York Times, [2] The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Harper's, McSweeney's, The Believer, The Threepenny Review, the London Review of Books, Harper's Weekly, [3] and The Wall Street Journal.
Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian-American literature. One of her short stories was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2019. Nunez, a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, is also the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature. Nunez is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was a James Merrill Fellow in December 2018-January 2019.
She has taught at Columbia, Princeton, Boston University, and the New School, and has been a visiting writer or writer in residence at Amherst, Smith, Baruch, Vassar, Syracuse, and the University of California, Irvine, among others. Nunez has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and of several other writers' conferences across the country. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
She lives in New York City. [4]
In 2024, two of her novels were adapted into films. [5] The duo Scott McGehee and David Siegel adapted her novel The Friend into a film starring Naomi Watts. [6] Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar adapted What Are You Going Through into his English feature debut, The Room Next Door , starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. [7] The latter was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion at the 81st Venice International Film Festival. [8]
Susan Lee Sontag was an American writer, critic, and public intellectual. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp' ", in 1964. Her best-known works include the critical works Against Interpretation (1966), On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978) and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), as well as the fictional works The Way We Live Now (1986), The Volcano Lover (1992), and In America (1999).
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Sontag: Her Life and Work is a 2019 biography of American writer Susan Sontag written by Benjamin Moser.
The Friend is a novel by American writer Sigrid Nunez published by Riverhead Books in 2018. The book concerns an unnamed novelist who adopts a Great Dane that belonged to a deceased friend and mentor.
What Are You Going Through is a 2020 novel by the American writer Sigrid Nunez published by Riverhead Books in 2020. In 2024, it was adapted into the Golden Lion-winning film The Room Next Door by Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar.
Salvation City is a 2010 novel by American writer Sigrid Nunez. The novel follows protagonist Cole Vining after he becomes orphaned by a fictional flu pandemic.
