Sigrid Nunez


Sigrid Nunez is an American author and writer who is best known for her novels. Her seventh novel, The Friend, won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. In 2025, Nunez was named as the recipient of a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in the fiction category.
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Biography

Sigrid Nunez was born and raised in New York City, the daughter of a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father. She received her BA from Barnard College and her MFA from Columbia University, after which she worked for a time as an editorial assistant at The [New York Review of Books]. Nunez has published nine novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, ''The Last of Her Kind, The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and, most recently, The Vulnerables. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag.
Among the journals to which Nunez has contributed are The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Harper's, McSweeney's, The Believer, The Threepenny Review, the London Review of Books, Harper's Weekly, and The Wall Street Journal.
Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian-American literature. One of her short stories was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2019. Nunez, a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, is also the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature. Nunez is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was a ellow in December 2018–January 2019.
She has taught at Columbia, Princeton, Boston University, and the New School, and has been a visiting writer or writer in residence at Amherst, Smith, Baruch, Vassar, Syracuse, and the University of California, Irvine, among others. Nunez has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and of several other writers' conferences across the country. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
She lives in New York City.
In 2024, two of her novels were adapted into films. The duo Scott McGehee and David Siegel adapted her novel The Friend into a film starring Naomi Watts. Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar adapted What Are You Going Through into his English feature debut, The Room Next Door'', starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. The latter was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion at the 81st Venice International Film Festival.

Book synopses

  • In A Feather on the Breath of God, "a young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother, who meet in postwar Germany and settle in New York City. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, the narrator escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents' stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet." The New York Times described Nunez's debut as "A forceful novel by a writer of uncommon talent."Naked Sleeper is "a novel about the inescapable and sometimes unendurable complexities of love and the family drama," in which a woman falls into an extramarital affair and attempts to understand the father who abandoned her as a child.Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury is a mock biography of a pet marmoset belonging to Leonard and Virginia Woolf. NPR described Mitz as " wry, supremely intelligent literary gem about devotion."For Rouenna. "Now in her fourth and perhaps best novel to date—about a writer haunted by her brief friendship with a former Vietnam combat nurse—Nunez revisits familiar Proustian territory with a frightening rigor."The Last of Her Kind follows the arc of a friendship between two women from different socioeconomic backgrounds who meet as roommates at Barnard College in 1968. Nunez has said that she wanted to write about the sixties by imagining the lives of "specific individuals who happened to come of age in that revolutionary time." Andrew O'Hehir called it "perhaps the finest yet written about that peculiar generation of young Americans who believed their destiny was to shape history."
  • In Salvation City, a thirteen-year-old boy is orphaned in a global flu pandemic and sent to live with an evangelical pastor and his wife. "Salvation City is a story of love, betrayal, and forgiveness. It is about spiritual and moral growth, and the consolation of art." Gary Shteyngart has said that the novel "makes one reconsider the ordering of our world."Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. In 1976, while recovering from surgery, Sontag hired Nunez to type her correspondence. Nunez began dating Sontag's son, David Rieff, and moved into the Upper West Side apartment that mother and son were sharing at the time. "This detailed, nuanced account of the more private side of a complex, contradictory public figure is told with even-handed good humor and more than a little compassion. Utterly absorbing." — Lydia DavisThe Friend. After her mentor and lifelong friend dies by suicide, a writer inherits his Great Dane. The Friend is both a "contemplation of writing and the loss of integrity in our literary life" and, in the words of Cathleen Schine, "the most original canine love story since ." It won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize. The Friend was a New York Times bestseller. It was short listed for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. In France, it was longlisted in the category of foreign fiction for the 2019 Prix Femina and selected as a finalist for the 2019 Prix du Meilleure Livre Étranger.What Are You Going Through. A woman agrees to help a terminally ill friend by going away with her and seeing her through the last days of her life. The friend is planning to take a euthanasia drug rather than let cancer take its course. "It's as good as The Friend, if not better." — Dwight GarnerThe Vulnerables. A writer, old enough to be considered a "vulnerable" in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, pet-sits a spirited parrot named Eureka in her friends' luxury apartment. When the original petsitter, a Gen Z college student, returns to the apartment, he and the narrator strike up an unlikely friendship. "Her Wordsworthian exploration of 'how much of life is shaped by sadness for what's left behind,' her rare ability to be at once wistfully elegiac and sharply hilarious make The Vulnerables a gift."

Selected stories

  • "The Summer of the Hats", The Threepenny Review 34
  • "Chang", The Threepenny Review 38 - excerpt from A Feather on the Breath of God
  • "Christa", The Iowa Review 21.1 - excerpt from A Feather on the Breath of God
  • "A Girl to Whirl", The Threepenny Review 47
  • "The Balloon", Salmagundi 93
  • "Reading", The Threepenny Review 52
  • "A Visit to the Great Man", The Threepenny Review 100
  • "The Naked Juror", Daedalus 134.1
  • , The Threepenny Review 127
  • , The Sun
  • ,Conjunctions 58
  • , Prairie Schooner 86.1 and Harper's
  • "The Blind", Paris Review 222 - excerpt from The Friend
  • , London Review of Books
  • , The New Yorker
  • "The Rabbit's Foot", ''The Yale Review''

Selected essays

Film adaptations

The Room Next Door, based on the novel What Are You Going Through.The Friend, based on the homonymous novel.