Sigrid Nunez has published seven novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, Salvation City, and, most recently, The Friend. She 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 has also been shortlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. Nunez’s other honors and awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Among the journals to which she has contributed are 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, McSweeney’s, Tin House, The Believer and newyorker.com. Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian-American literature. One of her short stories was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2019. Her work has either been or is being translated into twenty-five languages.
Nunez has taught at Columbia, Princeton, 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. Currently teaching at Boston University, she has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and of several other writers’ conferences across the country. She lives in New York City.
Selected Interviews
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