Ottessa Moshfegh
American author and novelist
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The basics
Quick Facts
| Intro | American author and novelist | |||||||||
| Places | United States of America | |||||||||
| is | Writer Novelist | |||||||||
| Work field | Literature | |||||||||
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| Birth | May 1981, Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, USA | |||||||||
| Age | 43 years | |||||||||
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| Notable Works |
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The details
Biography
Ottessa Charlotte Moshfegh (born 1981) is an American author and novelist. Her debut novel, Eileen (2015), won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a fiction finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Early life and education
Moshfegh was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1981. Her mother was born in Croatia and her father, who is Jewish, was born in Iran. Her parents were both musicians and taught at the New England Conservatory of Music. As a child, Moshfegh learned to play piano and clarinet.
She received her BA from Barnard College in 2002 and her MFA from Brown University in 2011.
Career
After college, Moshfegh moved to China, where she taught English and worked in a punk bar.
In her mid-twenties, Moshfegh moved to New York City. She worked for Overlook Press, and then as an assistant for Jean Stein. After contracting cat-scratch fever, she left the city and earned an MFA from Brown University.
Works
Fence Books published her novella, McGlue, in 2014.
Her novel Eileen was published by Penguin Press in August 2015, and received positive reviews. The book was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. In this book Eileen, the main character and narrator of the story, describes a series of events that occurred years ago, when she was young and living in a Massachusetts town that she refers to only as "X-ville." At the beginning of the novel we find her working as a secretary at a local juvenile prison while living with and caring for her abusive father, a retired police officer suffering from alcoholism and paranoia. As the story continues we learn more and more about a dramatic situation that causes her to leave her life in X-ville.
Homesick for Another World, a collection of short stories, was published in January 2017.
Moshfegh published her second novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, on July 10, 2018, by Penguin Press. The book describes a young woman in New York City in 2000 and 2001. Recently graduated from college and ambivalently mourning the recent deaths of both her parents, she undertakes to sleep for a year with the assistance of sleeping pills and other medications prescribed by a disreputable psychiatrist.
The same year, she penned a piece for Granta in which she describes an experience she had with a much older male writer when she was seventeen years old.
Moshfegh is a frequent contributor to the Paris Review, and she has published six stories in the journal since 2012.
Personal life
Moshfegh is married to the writer Luke Goebel, whom she met during an interview.
Awards and honors
- 2013–15 Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University
- 2013 Plimpton Prize for Fiction from The Paris Review for her story "Bettering Myself"
- 2014 Fence Modern Prize in Prose (judged by Rivka Galchen), inaugural winner for McGlue
- 2014 Believer Book Award winner for McGlue
- 2016 MacDowell Colony Fellowship
- 2016 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for Eileen
- 2016 Man Booker Prize (shortlist) for Eileen
- 2018 The Story Prize finalist for Homesick for Another World