Sigrid 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. Nunez is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. The Friend, a New York Times bestseller, won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize. In France, it was longlisted for the 2019 Prix Femina and named a finalist for the 2019 Prix du Meilleure Livre. It was also a finalist for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. In 2024, The New York Times listed The Friend among the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. The Friend has been adapted for film by directors David Siegel and Scott McGehee (2024). What Are You Going Through has been adapted for a film directed by Pedro Almodóvar, The Room Next Door (2024).
Nunez’s other honors and awards include a Whiting Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among the journals to which she has contributed are The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, Threepenny Review, Harper’s, and London Review of Books. Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian-American literature. Her story “The Plan” was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2019. Her essay “Life and Story,” originally published in The Sewanee Review, was selected for The Best American Essays 2023. Her work has been published in more than thirty countries.
Nunez has taught at Columbia, Princeton, and the New School, and has been a visiting writer or writer in residence at Boston University, Amherst, Smith, Baruch, Vassar, Syracuse, and the University of California, Irvine, among others. She lives in New York City.
Selected Interviews
Profile, by Wyatt Mason,
New York Times Magazine
By the Book, New York Times Book Review
Sewanee Review, Alan Ross
WAMC Book Show 2023
The Art of Fiction, Paris Review
Novel Dialogue with Tara Menon
CBC.CA Radio / Writers & Company
Writing Sex, video interview w/Jonathan Alexander
Virago OurShelves podcast w/Lucy Scholes
The Unspeakable podcast w/Meghan Daum
Books, Books, Books podcast w/Nicole Abadee
2020 International Dublin Literary Award Shortlist podcast
NPR Fresh Air 2020
BU Today
WAMC Book Show 2020
LARB Radio Hour
NPR Weekend Edition 2020
MPR News
WESA NPR
NPR Fresh Air 2019
NPR Weekend Edition 2018
WBUR
KUCI
WBUR Here and Now
WAMC Book Show 2018
WNYC Leonard Lopate
The Paris Review Daily
KCRW/Bookworm