Sigrid Nunez

­A lifelong New Yorker, Sigrid Nunez is the author of ten books, including the National Book Award-winning novel The Friend (2018), which has been celebrated by the New York Times as one of the 100 best books of the 21^st Century. Reaching beyond the confines of traditional plot and character development, Nunez’s fiction collages autobiography and imagination into universal portraits of the human experience. In her recent work, including The Vulnerables (2023) and What Are You Going Through (2020), Nunez’s unnamed narrators engage with grief and loss. Yet, buoyed by the author’s humor and masterful storytelling, readers are left feeling a profound sense of connection rather than isolation. Mentored by the literary luminaries Susan Sontag and Elizabeth Hardwick, and a dedicated reader of Virginia Woolf’s writing, Nunez combines intellectual rigor at the sentence level with an emotional pull all her own, drawing in a large, international readership—her work has been translated into over thirty languages. The writer and critic Lucy Sante has said of Nunez’s critically acclaimed work, “They’re like crime novels. Once you walk into them, you’re not getting out until you reach the end.” In 2024, Pedro Almodóvar adapted What Are You Going Through into the film The Room Next Door with Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, and The Friend became a movie starring Naomi Watts and Bill Murray. The recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2020), a Berlin Prize Fellowship (2005), the Rome Prize in Literature (2001), and a Whiting Award (1993), Nunez has taught at Boston University, Columbia, the New School, and Princeton, among other institutions with esteemed literary programs, and now devotes herself to writing.