Claire Messud

2024 Prize Jury

Claire Messud's novels include The Emperor's Children, a 2006 New York Times Book of the Year and an international bestseller, The Woman Upstairs (2013) and The Burning Girl (2017), a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. Twice a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the recipient of the Encore Award, the Straus Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, she's the author of a memoir in essays, Kant's Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write. She writes criticism for Harper's magazine, The New York Review of Books and The New York Times, and was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2020 by the French ministry of culture. She teaches creative writing at Harvard University. Her new novel This Strange Eventful History will be published in May 2024 by WW Norton.