Award-winning author Jennifer Egan is best known for “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” the novel that won her the 2011 Pulitzer Prize. The novel is recognized for its unusual narrative structure, consisting of thirteen intertwining short stories. It explores the self-destructive tendencies of a large cast of characters, all connected to a record company executive and his assistant, and maps the way their lives change as they grow over the decades. The novel shifts back and forth in time between the 1970s, the present, and the near future. It also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.
In 2022, Egan published “The Candy House,” a sequel to “A Visit from the Goon Squad.”
Egan has also received critical acclaim for many of her other works. “Manhattan Beach,” a historical thriller set in the Brooklyn Navy Yard during the Great Depression and World War II, won the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal and was nominated for the National Book Award. “Look at Me,” the story of a model that has to undergo facial reconstruction after a car crash, was also a finalist for the National Book Award. Her first novel, “The Invisible Circus,” follows a girl traveling through Europe, retracing the footsteps of her dead sister, and was adapted to a feature film starring Jordana Brewster and Cameron Diaz.
Egan is also an award-winning journalist and has written frequently for The New York Times. Her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and in 2008, she won an Outstanding Media Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness for her piece on bipolar children.
“Fiction is my deepest love, but I love journalism, too. It keeps me thinking vigorously, and it reminds me that there is a world out there,” she said in an interview with The Guardian.
Egan majored in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and earned her master of arts from St. John’s College, Cambridge. She has published short fiction in the New Yorker, Harper's, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, and until 2020, she served as the President of PEN America.