Jeffrey Eugenides

Eugenides grew up in Detroit and its suburbs in a Greek-American family whose immigrant history would later supply the raw material for Middlesex, and studied English at Brown before earning an MFA at Stanford. His debut novel, The Virgin Suicides, narrated collectively by neighborhood boys obsessed with five doomed sisters, became a cult favorite and, in 1999, an acclaimed film directed by Sofia Coppola.

Middlesex, nine years in the writing, traced three generations of a Greek-American family from the 1922 burning of Smyrna to a genetically intersex narrator's coming of age in 1970s Detroit, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. The Marriage Plot, a campus novel set in the early 1980s, followed years later.

He has taught creative writing at Princeton for many years, publishing selectively rather than prolifically.