Emma Cline

Emma Cline is an American author who won the Shirley Jackson Award for Novel for The Girls (2016), a coming-of-age psychological thriller about a girl on the margins of a Manson-like cult in 1960s Northern California. The novel was a major literary sensation upon publication, earning a large advance and critical acclaim. Born in 1989 in Sonoma County, California, Cline studied at Middlebury College and Columbia University. The Girls was her debut novel and drew directly on the landscape and atmosphere of her Northern California upbringing. It was praised for its hypnotic prose style, its excavation of female adolescent experience, and its portrait of cult psychology. Cline has also published a short story collection, Daddy, and the novel The Guest (2023), another psychological study of youth and desire. She lives in New York City.