Lauren Groff

Lauren Groff is an American novelist and short-story writer whose work combines literary experimentation with recurring interests in gender, power, family, faith and humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Born in Cooperstown, New York, in 1978, she studied at Amherst College and earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her books include The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies and the story collections Delicate Edible Birds, Florida and Brawler. Groff has been a three-time finalist for the National Book Award, while Florida won the Story Prize.

Groff’s principal historical novels are Matrix and The Vaster Wilds. Matrix imaginatively reconstructs the life of the twelfth-century poet Marie de France, depicting her transformation from an unwanted court dependent into the formidable leader of an English abbey and exploring female authority, religious experience and communal independence. The Vaster Wilds follows a servant escaping an early seventeenth-century English settlement in North America, using her struggle through the wilderness to examine colonialism, faith, survival and European assumptions about dominion over the land. Although most of Groff’s other fiction is contemporary or spans several periods, these two books establish her clearly as an author of literary historical fiction.