Jennifer Egan

Egan grew up in San Francisco, studied English at the University of Pennsylvania, and won a Marshall Scholarship to Cambridge before working for years as a journalist, writing extensively for The New York Times Magazine on subjects from homeless teenagers to fertility science, reporting that shaped her attentiveness to structure and voice in fiction.

Her early novels, The Invisible Circus and Look at Me, built a reputation for formal experimentation before A Visit from the Goon Squad, a novel-in-stories that jumps decades and narrators around the music industry, including one chapter told entirely as a child's PowerPoint presentation, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2011.

She returned to the same characters years later in a sequel, The Candy House, extending the original's fascination with memory, technology, and time.