Maggie Shipstead
Photo courtesy of Maggie Shipstead
Bio
Maggie Shipstead is the author of the novels Astonish Me and Seating Arrangements, which won the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. A third novel, Great Circle, is on its way. She is a graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Her writing has appeared many places, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, Travel + Leisure, Departures, Condé Nast Traveler, Outside, The Best American Short Stories, and The Best American Sports Writing. In 2012 and 2018, she was a National Magazine Award finalist for fiction. She lives in Los Angeles.
I spent more than four years writing the first draft of my third novel, constructing a narrative that was entirely private—I didn’t show my work to anyone. The project took on unanticipated complexities and difficulties and kept expanding seemingly of its own accord, like an eccentric, rambling house full of askew doorways and hastily added turrets. When I finally reached the end, I had a manuscript of nearly a thousand pages. After another year of revision (and much cutting!), I sliced off a tiny sliver and sent it to the National Endowment for the Arts. Opening the doors to a fictional world and inviting in readers is always scary, and the validation of this fellowship in this particular moment for this particular work is profoundly meaningful to me. Though the novel, Great Circle, is now nearing its final form, this grant will form an important bridge to my next project, and, for a writer, standing on solid footing is a rare and liberating luxury. I’m grateful to the NEA selection committee for undertaking a monumental amount of reading, and I’m honored to be included in the community of past, present, and future fellows.