Lydia Millet

Lydia Millet is an American novelist and conservationist, the author of 9 novels, 2 short story collections, and 3 novels for young adults. NPR called her most recent story collection, Fight No More (2018), "her most philosophically confident and complex work yet. It's a novel about death disguised as a story collection about real estate, and it's alternately wrenching and hilarious, peaceful and joyful, so tender you almost can't bear it and so brutal you know that you can't.” Her most recent novel, Sweet Lamb of Heaven (2016), blends domestic thriller and psychological horror as a mother flees her estranged husband; it was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her novel Magnificence (2012) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her story collection Love in Infant Monkeys (2010) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Laura Miller of Salon has described Millet’s writing as “…always flawlessly beautiful, reaching for an experience that precedes language itself.” Millet has written books and stories that range from the philosophical to the satirical, on matters including the inventors of the atom bomb, political culture under George H. W. Bush, the discovery of mermaids in a coral reef and the crises of extinction and climate change. She lives in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona with her two children and works for the Center for Biological Diversity.