Acclaimed author Lauren Groff has three novels to her name: Fates and Furies (2015), Arcadia (2012), and The Monsters of Templeton (2008), and has been featured in publications such as the New Yorker, the Atlantic, American Short Fiction, Harper’s Tin House, and One Story. She has also written two collections of short stories: Florida (2018) and Delicate Edible Birds (2009).
Groff graduated from Amherst College, following which she received her MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2017, she was named one of Granta Magazine’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her novel, Fates and Furies, was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kirkus Award, won the 2015 American Booksellers’ Association Indies’ Choice Award for Fiction, and was on over two dozen best-of 2015 lists among other accolades.
Published in 2018, Groff’s Florida is a collection of short stories that deals with the untamed, excavating the wild, wicked, weltering secrecies of the Sunshine State. The Paris Review describes her work as “subversive, but quietly—it captures what’s mysterious about the inevitable, what’s bizarre about the inescapable….These are stories about how human nature is an extension of the natural world, how our relationships are contoured by greater forces, and how time is delivered by nature—regardless of the checks and measurements we superimpose.”
And Groff does very much embrace mystery. She says: “I initially try really, really hard to leave as much mystery as possible in the writing process…I want this to be messy.” The messy, the mysterious, the apertures in what people can understand about themselves, those around them, the world—these are Groff’s subjects. She is a master of them.
Lauren Groff will give a craft talk titled “Breaking the Bones” on August 2 at 1:30 p.m. She will also be reading at Pine Ridge Vineyards on July 31. Visit our Literary Events page for more information on how to attend lectures and readings.
