Sigrid Nunez has published eight novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, Salvation City, The Friend, and, most recently, What Are You Going Through. Her new novel, The Vulnerables, will be published in November 2023. 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. 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. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 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, London Review of Books, 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 been translated into thirty languages.
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. Currently teaching in the MFA program in creative writing at Hunter College, 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
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