Sigrid Nunez Books in Order

Sigrid Nunez was born and raised in New York City, the daughter of a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father. Her family history, the city around her, and the complicated business of belonging would later find their way into her fiction.

She studied at Barnard College, earning a BA in 1972, then completed an MFA at Columbia University in 1975. Afterward, she worked as an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books, a job that brought her close to the working world of writers, editors, and ideas.

It was a useful place to begin.

During the 1970s, Nunez also came to know Susan Sontag and Sontag's son, David Rieff. Years later, she wrote Sempre Susan, a direct, personal memoir about that period, Sontag's forceful presence, and a young writer learning what a writing life might demand.

Her first novel, A Feather on the Breath of God, arrived in 1995. It follows the daughter of immigrant parents as she looks back on family stories, childhood in a New York housing project, ballet, language, and the uneasy ways identity can take shape. The book set out concerns that recur throughout Nunez's work: memory, class, family ties, solitude, and the stories people tell about themselves.

Nunez has never stayed with just one kind of novel. Mitz imagines the Bloomsbury world through Virginia and Leonard Woolf's pet marmoset. For Rouenna turns to a friendship shaped by a Vietnam War nurse's memories. In The Last of Her Kind, two former college roommates carry the arguments and fractures of the late 1960s into adult life.

Then came catastrophe on a wider scale.

Salvation City places a teenage boy in a religious community after a flu pandemic kills his family. Later novels, including The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and The Vulnerables, return to intimate encounters: a bereaved writer and a Great Dane, a friend facing terminal illness, strangers trying to make contact during the pandemic. The plots are often quiet, but the questions are not. How do people care for one another? What do they owe the dead? What can companionship, human or animal, actually do?

The Friend won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2018 and brought many new readers to her work. Her books often make room for humor beside grief, and for digressions about writing, art, teaching, animals, and the strange things people say when they are trying to be heard.

Alongside her fiction, Nunez has taught at universities and writing programs, including Columbia, Princeton, the New School, Boston University, Amherst, and Smith. Her honors include the Whiting Award, the Rome Prize, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize. She lives in New York City, still writing books that start with ordinary encounters and keep following the questions beneath them.