Claire Messud

Claire Messud’s bestselling novels include The Emperor’s Children, a New York Times Book of the Year in 2006; The Woman Upstairs (2013); and The Burning Girl (2017), a finalist for the LA Times Book Award in Fiction. She is also the author of a book of novellas, The Hunters (2001), and a memoir-in-essays, Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write (2020). Her work has been translated into over twenty languages. She writes for Harper’s Magazine, The New York Review of Books and the New York Times, among other publications. She was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2020, and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters and of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2025.  

Her most recent novel, This Strange Eventful History, published in 2024 by W.W. Norton, was shortlisted for the American Library in Paris Book Award and longlisted for the Booker Prize and the Giller Prize. It was awarded an American Book Award (2025); and was selected as a book of the year by the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Scotsman, the Evening Standard, The New York Post, the New Yorker, Vogue, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly and a top ten historical novel by the New York Times. She teaches regularly at the New York State Writers Institute, Sewanee Writers Conference and Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and taught creative writing at Harvard University from 2015-2025. 

updated October 2025