Sigrid Nunez

Sigrid Nunez (born 1951) is an American writer, best known for her novels.

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, and What Are You Going Through. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Her ninth novel, The Vulnerables, published in November, 2023.

Among the journals to which Nunez has contributed are The New York Times, 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, 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.

Her seventh novel, The Friend, won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction.

Sigrid Nunez was born and raised in New York City, the daughter of a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father.

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 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.