Emily St. John Mandel is a Canadian novelist, born in British Columbia in 1979, acclaimed for elegant, interlinked fiction that moves between literary realism and the speculative.
She trained as a contemporary dancer in Toronto and worked in administration - in architecture and in cancer research - before writing full time; she now divides her life between Brooklyn and Los Angeles. Her early novels, among them Last Night in Montreal and The Lola Quartet, drew on the textures of literary noir.
Her breakthrough was Station Eleven, which follows a troupe of Shakespearean actors travelling a depopulated Great Lakes region two decades after a devastating pandemic - a strikingly hopeful meditation on art and memory that won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and was adapted into an acclaimed television miniseries. She has continued to weave a loosely connected body of work across The Glass Hotel, a story of a vast financial fraud, and Sea of Tranquility, which braids together time travel and the question of whether our world is a simulation.
Precise, haunting and quietly profound, she writes fiction in which recurring characters and images echo from book to book, building a single, resonant world.
