Gwendoline Riley

Raised near Birkenhead, England, Gwendoline Riley is the author of seven novels. Riley’s debut, Cold Water (2002), earned her a Betty Trask Award and introduced readers to her signature style, which vibrates with both humor and the haunting recognition of profound distance within our deepest attachments. Whether exploring a turbulent marriage or a troubled mother-daughter relationship, Riley shows us characters trying to communicate with words almost always destined to fail at conveying what they really mean. “Riley’s prose is deceptively simple, drawing you further and further into the labyrinth of the self,” wrote Joanna Kavenna in her review of First Love (2017) for The Guardian. “She focuses in, closer and closer, until the banal becomes surreal, even beautiful.” In the novel’s closing pages, after an accumulation of excruciating arguments, the narrator describes a genial walk on "a nice day.” This unflinching attitude towards life’s paradoxes has garnered Riley a cult following. In 2022, the New York Review of Books introduced Riley to stateside readers with the simultaneous release of My Phantoms and First Love, followed by The Palm House this year. In the age of the hybrid writer, Riley remains committed to the novel, and to the consolations of her art: “No matter how bad things get,” she has said, “you can write about it. You can make something out of it; I hope, something elegant and interesting.”