Ottessa Moshfegh

Ottessa Moshfegh is an American novelist and short story writer whose darkly funny, psychologically acute fiction has made her one of the most distinctive and acclaimed literary voices of her generation. Born in Boston in 1981 to a Croatian mother and an Iranian father, Moshfegh studied at Barnard College and Brown University, where she earned her MFA. She held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Eileen (2015), her debut novel, follows a deeply unhappy young woman working in a boys' prison in 1960s New England. The novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the PEN/Hemingway Award. My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) became a literary sensation — the story of a beautiful, privileged young woman in pre-9/11 New York who attempts to hibernate for an entire year using a cocktail of prescription drugs. Death in Her Hands follows an elderly widow who finds a mysterious note in the woods and constructs an elaborate fantasy around it. Lapvona (2022) is a dark medieval fable about greed, faith, and suffering. Moshfegh's fiction is characterised by unreliable narrators, dark humour, bodily disgust, and a fascination with characters who exist at the margins of conventional behaviour. Her prose is precise, her psychological insights are razor-sharp, and her willingness to make readers uncomfortable is matched by her ability to make them laugh. The audiobook editions of Moshfegh's novels are compelling — her distinctive narrative voices are perfectly suited to audio performance. Her books and audiobooks are essential for readers who love dark literary fiction, unreliable narrators, and writing that is both disturbing and funny.