Claire Messud
Messud at the 2009 Brooklyn Book Festival
Messud at the 2009 Brooklyn Book Festival
Born1966 (age 56–57)
Greenwich, Connecticut, U.S.
OccupationNovelist, teacher
NationalityAmerican
SpouseJames Wood
Website
www.clairemessud.com

Claire Messud (born 1966) is an American novelist and literature and creative writing professor. She is best known as the author of the novel The Emperor's Children (2006).

Early life

Born in Greenwich, Connecticut,[1] Messud grew up in the United States, Australia, and Canada, returning to the United States as a teenager.[2] Messud's mother is Canadian, and her father is a Pied-noir from French Algeria. She was educated at the University of Toronto Schools[3] and Milton Academy. She did undergraduate and graduate studies at Yale University and Cambridge University, where she met her spouse James Wood.[4]

In 1989, after her two years at Cambridge ended, Messud entered the M.F.A. program at Syracuse University. However, she soon felt that that endeavor was not a good fit for her aspirations, as all the other students, in addition to being older, and "already married and sometimes getting divorced", were heavily interested in American authors whose work she was not yet familiar with, such as Charles Baxter, Leonard Michaels, and Ann Beattie. Messud's literary tastes were steeped more toward the experimental female authors with whom her mother had raised her, such as Katherine Mansfield, Djuna Barnes, Elizabeth Bowen, and Jean Rhys.[5]

Career

Messud's debut novel, When The World Was Steady (1995), was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 1999, she published her second book, The Last Life, about three generations of a French-Algerian family. Her 2001 work, The Hunters, consists of two novellas.[1] The Emperor's Children, which Messud wrote while a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2004–2005,[6] was critically praised and became a New York Times bestseller, as well as being longlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. In April 2013, Messud published her sixth novel, The Woman Upstairs. Her 2017 novel, The Burning Girl, was named one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times.[7]

Messud has taught creative writing at Amherst College, Kenyon College, University of Maryland, Yale University, in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in North Carolina, in the Graduate Writing program at Johns Hopkins University, and at Harvard University. Messud also taught at Sewanee: The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She is on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College.[8] She has contributed articles to publications such as The New York Review of Books.[9]

In 2009, Messud began teaching a literary traditions course each spring semester as a part of CUNY Hunter College's MFA Program in Creative Writing. She subsequently taught creative writing at other schools, including the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University.[10]

Personal life

Messud has two children, Livia[11] and Lucian.[5][11]

Awards

The American Academy of Arts and Letters has recognized Messud's talent with both an Addison Metcalf Award and a Strauss Living Award. She was considered for the 2003 Granta Best of Young British Novelists list, although none of the three passports she holds is British.[12] As of 2010–2011, she is a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin / Institute of Advanced Study.

Bibliography

  • When the World Was Steady. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. 1995. ISBN 978-0-393-35509-3.
  • The Last Life: A Novel. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 1999. ISBN 978-0-547-56385-5.
  • The Hunters. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2001. pp. 200–. ISBN 978-0-547-56387-9.
  • The Professor's History, Picador, 2006, ISBN 9780330445771
  • The Emperor's Children. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. 29 August 2006. ISBN 978-0-307-26601-9.
  • The Woman Upstairs. Knopf Canada. 30 April 2013. ISBN 978-0-307-40118-2.(longlisted for the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize)
  • The Burning Girl. W. W. Norton & Company. 2017. ISBN 978-0-393-63502-7.
  • Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write. An Autobiography in Essays. W. W. Norton & Company. 2020. ISBN 978-1324006756.

References

  1. 1 2 van Gelder, Lawrence. "Footlights", The New York Times, January 2, 2003 Section E, p. 1
  2. ↑ Dennis Lythgoe, "Author's cultural diversity enriches her fiction writing," The Deseret News, October 1, 2006.
  3. ↑ Katrina Onstad, "Bestselling novelist Claire Messud returns with The Woman Upstairs," Toronto Life, March 2013
  4. ↑ Mokoto Rich (September 6, 2006). "For Claire Messud, Good Reviews and Now, Finally, Good Sales". The New York Times.
  5. 1 2 Franklin, Ruth (August 10, 2017). "Who's Afraid of Claire Messud?". The New York Times. Archived from the original on August 13, 2017. Retrieved March 20, 2023.
  6. ↑ "Fellowship / Fellows: Claire Messud". Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. 2004. Archived from the original on December 11, 2012. Retrieved March 21, 2023.
  7. ↑ "Best books of 2017: The best fiction". Los Angeles Times. November 30, 2017. Archived from the original on December 25, 2022. Retrieved July 4, 2020.
  8. ↑ "About | The Common". Thecommononline.org. 15 July 2016. Retrieved 2017-01-22.
  9. ↑ Messud, Claire. "The Wizard of West Fifty-seventh Street", The Paris Review Daily, March 29, 2012
  10. ↑ "Claire Messud, The Emperor's Children". The Literature of 9/11. University of Maryland. 2014. Archived from the original on September 2, 2022. Retrieved March 20, 2023.
  11. 1 2 Kachka, Boris (April 21, 2013). "At Home With Claire Messud and James Wood, the First Couple of American Fiction". Vulture. Archived from the original on April 24, 2013. Retrieved March 20, 2023.
  12. ↑ Bedell, Geraldine. "Granta's grotto", The Guardian, January 4, 2003, accessed April 9, 2012

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