Jennifer Egan

Born in Chicago in 1962, but raised in San Francisco, Jennifer Egan attended the University of Pennsylvania, where she won the prestigious Thouron Award, which allowed her to continue her studies at Cambridge University in the UK. Her short stories have appeared in a number of magazines, including the New Yorker, McSweeney's, and Granta. Her first novel The Invisible Circus was published in 1999. The story of an American girl in Italy trying to figure out the mystery of her sister's suicide was turned into a movie in 2001. The same year, her second novel, Look At Me, was published and earned a spot as a finalist for the National Book Award. Her 2006 novel, The Keep was a contemporary gothic mystery, a national bestseller that earned accolades from critics across the country. In addition to novels, Egan continued to write shorter, journalistic pieces for the New York Times Magazine and GQ, among others. Her 2011 novel Welcome to the Goon Squad was an unclassifiable collection of stories that imaginatively captured the current zeitgeist. The book won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times book prize. In 2017, Egan published Manhattan Beach, a historical drama set in New York in the early Twentieth Century.