About Jennifer Egan

Long Version

(NOT to be used for introductions, please!)

Jennifer Egan’s 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, has been awarded the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Egan was born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco. She is also the author of The Invisible Circus, a novel which became a feature film starring Cameron Diaz in 2001, Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2001, Emerald City and Other Stories, The Keep, and A Visit From the Goon Squad, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the LA Times Book Prize, and was recently named one of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York read. Her new novel, The Candy House, a companion to A Visit From the Goon Squad, also a Times bestseller, was named one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2022 and one of President Obama’s favorite reads of the year. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Also a journalist, she has written frequently in the New York Times Magazine; her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and “The Bipolar Kid” received a 2009 NAMI Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Her year-long reporting on street homelessness and supportive housing in New York City was published in The New Yorker in September, 2023. She has served as President of PEN America and twice as Artist-in-Residence in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has taught courses in 19th and 20th Century literature.

Short Version

(Introducers, please use this one to prevent audience slumber!)

Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York read. Her previous novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was recently named one of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Her new novel, The Candy House, a companion to A Visit From the Goon Squad, was named one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2022 and one of President Obama’s favorite reads of the year. She has served as President of PEN America and twice as Artist-in-Residence in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has taught courses in 19th and 20th Century literature. Her year-long reporting on street homelessness and supportive housing in New York City was published in The New Yorker in September of 2023.