Sigrid Nunez

Nunez grew up in a Chinese-Panamanian father's and a German mother's household in a Staten Island housing project, studied at Barnard and Columbia, and for a time worked as an assistant to Susan Sontag while briefly involved with Sontag's son, the writer David Rieff, a chapter she later revisited in the memoir Sempre Susan.

The Friend (2018) follows an unnamed writer who inherits her mentor's aging Great Dane after his suicide, the dog's enormous, grieving presence in her small apartment becoming the occasion for a fragmented meditation on writing, loss, and friendship; it won the National Book Award.

Nunez has published steadily across decades, including What Are You Going Through, and taught creative writing at Columbia and elsewhere, continuing to write spare, essayistic fiction that resists conventional plot.