Ottessa Moshfegh

Ottessa Moshfegh was born in Boston in 1981 to two musicians who taught at the New England Conservatory: her father an Iranian Jew, her mother a Croatian. Her first novel, Eileen (2015), won the PEN/Hemingway Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was filmed in 2023. My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) made her one of the most widely read American novelists of her generation; she has since published Death in Her Hands and Lapvona and writes for the screen.