Lauren Groff is an American author, best known for her short stories and novels. She was born in New York in 1978. She later attended Amherst College and the University of Wisconsin Madison, where she earned her Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing. In 2008, Hyperion published her debut novel, The Monsters of Temple, which earned recognition from the Orange Prize for New Writers and the San Francisco Chronicle. 

In 2009, Groff released her sophomore title, a short story collection called Delicate Edible Birds. The collection included stories Groff had previously published in The Atlantic, Five Points, Ploughshares, and The New Yorker. Select stories from the collection also appeared in Best New American Voices 2008 and in the 2007, 2010, and 2014 editions of The Best American Short Stories. Groff’s other titles include her second full-length novel Arcadia (2012), Fates and Furies (2015), her second short-story collection Florida (2018), Matrix (2021), and The Vaster Wilds (2023).

Groff has earned many awards for her fiction writing since her emergence on the literary stage. Such honors include winning The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Groff has also earned fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Howard D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Groff’s fiction publications are in conversation with other contemporary fiction titles, including Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, Sophie Ward’s Love and Other Thought Experiments, and R. O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries.