Madeline Miller is an American novelist, born in Boston in 1978 and raised in New York City and Philadelphia, whose two books have done as much as anything this century to return Greek myth to the bestseller lists.
A classicist by training, with degrees in Latin and Ancient Greek from Brown, she spent over a decade teaching both languages to secondary school students, and wrote her debut in the stolen hours around teaching.
That book, The Song of Achilles, ten years in the writing, retold the Iliad through the eyes of Patroclus and won the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction; a decade later it found an enormous second life through BookTok and returned to the charts in its millions.
Circe followed in 2018, giving voice to the witch of Aiaia, the sun god's overlooked daughter who transforms Odysseus's men to swine and must ultimately choose between the world of gods she was born to and the mortal world she comes to love. Fierce, feminist and gorgeously written, it was a number one New York Times bestseller, was shortlisted for the Women's Prize, and turned Homeric epic into book-club essential.
Her short work includes Galatea, a retelling of the Pygmalion myth.
She lives outside Philadelphia, where a long-promised third novel, reportedly drawn from the myth of Persephone, is awaited with some impatience.
