The 2018 shortlist

Curtis Sittenfeld is the bestselling author of five novels: ‘Prep’, ‘The Man of My Dreams’, ‘American Wife’, ‘Sisterland’ and ‘Eligible’. Her first story collection, ‘You Think It, I’ll Say It’, will be published in 2018. Her books have been selected by The New York Times, Time, Entertainment Weekly and People for their “Ten Best Books of the Year” lists, optioned for television and film, and translated into twenty-five languages. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and Esquire, and her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Time, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic and Slate. A graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is married with two children and lives in the American Mid-West.

Allegra Goodman is an American writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Three of her novels have been published in the UK by Atlantic Books. They are ‘The Chalk Artist’, ‘The Cookbook Collector’ and ‘Intuition’ (shortlisted for the Wellcome Prize in 2009). Her other novels are ‘Paradise Park’ and ‘Kaaterskill Falls’ (a National Book Award finalist in 1996). Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Commentary and Ploughshares and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories, and she has written two collections of short stories, ‘The Family Markowitz’ and ‘Total Immersion’, and a novel for younger readers, ‘The Other Side of the Island’. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Boston Globe and The American Scholar. She grew up in Honolulu, and studied English and philosophy at Harvard, received a PhD in English literature from Stanford, and was a recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award (1991), the Salon Award for Fiction (1997) and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2006-2007). She lives with her husband and has four children.

Victor Lodato born in New Jersey. He is the author of ‘Edgar and Lucy’ (Head of Zeus) and ‘Mathilda Savitch’ (2009), which was hailed by The New York Times as “a Salingeresque wonder of a first novel”. The novel won the PEN USA Award for Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and has been published in sixteen countries, including the UK (Fourth Estate). Victor is a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Camargo Foundation (France) and the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy). He was shortlisted for the 2017 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. His short fiction and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta and Best American Short Stories. His new novel, ‘Edgar and Lucy’, is published by Doubleday in February 2018. Lodato currently divides his time between Tucson, Arizona and Ashland, Oregon.

Molly McCloskey was born in Philadelphia and grew up in North Carolina and Oregon. In 1989, she moved to Ireland, spending ten years on the west coast before moving to Dublin. She is the author of two short story collections, ‘Solomon’s Seal’ and ‘The Beautiful Changes’, and a novel, ‘Protection’. Her first work of non-fiction, ‘Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother’, appeared in 2011. Her new novel was published by Penguin Ireland in 2017 as ‘When Light is Like Water’, and in the US by Scribner in 2018 under the title ‘Straying’. Her work has appeared in the Irish Times, Dublin Review,Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere. She has taught writing at universities in Ireland and the US, serving as writer-in-residence at Trinity College, Dublin, University College, Dublin, and George Washington University in Washington, DC. She has also worked in the field of international development in the UN’s Kenya-based Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs for Somalia. She currently lives in Washington, DC, and recently served as a judge for the DC-based PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Courtney Zoffness won the 2017 Arts & Letters Creative Nonfiction Prize, the 2016 American Literary Review Fiction Prize, and was an Emerging Writing Fellowship from the Center for Fiction. She has received awards from the MacDowell Colony and the Bread of Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Indiana Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Zoffness has taught at numerous institutions, including Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, Allegheny College and the University of Freiburg, where she was a writer-in-residence. She currently directs the Creative Writing Program at Drew University in New Jersey and lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.

Miranda July is a filmmaker, artist and writer. Her most recent book is ‘The First Bad Man’, her debut novel; Andrew Solomon described it as “an audaciously original, often hilarious map of the ever-expanding reach of unhinged imagination in America”. July’s collection of stories, ‘No One Belongs Here More Than You’, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and has been published in twenty-three countries. ‘It Chooses You’ was her first book of non-fiction. She wrote, directed and starred in The Future and Me and You and Everyone We Know — winner of the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a Special Jury Prize at Sundance. July’s short fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and Zoetrope. She is the recipient of a 2016 USA Artist fellowship award and is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Raised in Berkeley, California, July lives in Los Angeles.