Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
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, the ABA Indies' Choice Award, France's Grand Prix de l'Héroïne, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her 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.
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 ...
Joseph Hillstrom King, born in 1971 (pen name: Joe Hill), is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Fireman and Heart-Shaped Box. His second novel, Horns, was made into a feature film starring Daniel Radcliffe; his ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Monsters of Templeton
Try:
Heart-Shaped Box
by Joe Hill
Sue Monk Kidd was raised in the small town of Sylvester, Georgia, a place that deeply influenced the writing of her first novel The Secret Life of Bees. She graduated from Texas Christian University in 1970 and later took ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Matrix
Try:
The Book of Longings
by Sue Monk Kidd
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