Claire Messud

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Claire Messud (born 1966) is an American novelist. Her 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, is a book of two novellas. Her most recent novel, The Emperor’s Children has been longlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. Messud’s work has been recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters with both an Addison Metcalf Award and a Strauss Living Award.

Born in the United States, Messud grew up in Australia and Canada, returning to the US as a teenager. Her mother is Canadian, her father is of Algerian origin, and her sister is French. Messud was educated at Yale University and then Cambridge, where she met her spouse, the British literary critic James Wood [1]. She has taught creative writing at Amherst College, in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina and in the Graduate Writing program at Johns Hopkins University. Messud was considered for the 2003 Granta Best of Young British Novelists list, but none of the three passports she held was British [2]. She has two children and lives in Massachusetts.