Sigrid Nunez

Sigrid Nunez was born in 1951 in New York City, the daughter of a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother. She grew up in New York, attended Barnard College, and earned an MFA from Columbia University. She worked briefly as an assistant to Susan Sontag before beginning a career as a novelist and essayist. She teaches creative writing at Boston University. Nunez's novels include A Feather on the Breath of God (1995), The Last of Her Kind (2006), and Sempre Susan (2011), a memoir about Susan Sontag. Her novel The Friend (2018), a meditation on grief, friendship, and literature narrated by a writer who inherits her recently deceased friend's Great Dane, won the National Book Award for Fiction 2018. Her subsequent novels include What Are You Going Through (2020) and The Vulnerables (2023).