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Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
How to pronounce Lauren Groff: "Groff" rhymes with "off."
Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies, Matrix, and The Vaster Wilds, and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won the Story Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2024 she was named one of the "TIME 100 most influential people." Groff's work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into thirty-six languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, where she and her husband run an independent bookstore, The Lynx.
Lauren Groff's website
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A Conversation with Lauren Groff about Matrix
Your first novel since Fates and Furies takes a dramatic shift from your usual contemporary settings. How did you land on this particular setting? Where did the idea first come to you?
I had a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study when I heard Dr. Katie Bugyis give a speech on medieval nuns' liturgical notes. I had thought, going in, that it perhaps wasn't something I would be interested in, but her talk just exploded my mind. Also, we were in the middle of the Trump presidency, and I was exhausted; I just wanted to live in a female utopia. After Katie's talk I knew I wanted to go to a nunnery, all the way back to the days of medieval Benedictine enclosures, to be entirely surrounded by women. Hers was the right lecture at the right time. It lit the wick.
Your main character was a real person, Marie de France. When you were conceptualizing Marie, how much came from historical text, and how much was your own creation?
Nobody knows all that much about the life of the historical figure Marie de France, who was the first published woman in French. Her identity is sort of shadowy. There are suppositions that she may have been an abbess, and/or the ...
M.T. ANDERSON is the New York Times bestselling author of Feed, a National Book Award finalist and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, winner of the ... (more)
Sarah Braunstein is the author of Bad Animals and The Sweet Relief of Missing Children. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories, among other publications, and she received a National ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Brawler
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Baby in a Box
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