Claire Messud

CO-FOUNDER

Claire Messud’s bestselling novels include The Emperor’s Children, a New York Times Book of the Year in 2006; The Woman Upstairs (2013); and The Burning Girl (2017), a finalist for the LA Times Book Award in Fiction. She is also the author of a memoir-in-essays, Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write (2020). Her work has been translated into over twenty languages. She writes for Harper’s Magazine, The New York Review of Books and the New York Times. She was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2020. Her most recent novel, This Strange Eventful History (2024), was shortlisted for the American Library in Paris Book Award and longlisted for the Booker Prize and the Giller Prize. Messud taught creative writing at Harvard University from 2015 – 2025.