Sigrid Nunez: From the Fort Greene Houses to the National Book Award

Singrid Nunez Photo Credit: Adam Lerner

A note from our founder

This tribute honors a writer whose path to literary acclaim began in Brooklyn public housing. Sigrid Nunez spent part of her childhood in the Fort Greene Houses, and decades later she would win the National Book Award for a novel about grief, friendship, and a very large dog. Brooklyn doesn't always announce itself loudly in a writer's biography — sometimes it's just there, quietly, at the root of everything that comes after.

A Childhood Between Two Boroughs

Sigrid Nunez was born on March 12, 1951, in New York City, the daughter of a German mother and a father of Chinese and Panamanian descent. Her early years were shaped by public housing, including time spent in Brooklyn's Fort Greene Houses before her family later lived on Staten Island. Growing up between cultures and between boroughs gave Nunez an outsider's eye early on, one she would carry into her fiction for the rest of her career. She went on to earn her B.A. from Barnard College in 1972 and an M.F.A. from Columbia University in 1975, and worked for a time as an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books, where she absorbed the rhythms of serious literary prose from the inside.

An Intimate, Unmistakable Style

Nunez has built a body of work defined by an unusually intimate, conversational voice. Her novels often read less like conventional narratives and more like the private meditations of a sharp, unsparing mind — blending memoir, criticism, and fiction into something that resists easy categorization. She writes about grief, solitude, aging, and the strange work of making art with a dry wit and an emotional honesty that never tips into sentimentality. It's a style that took years to be fully recognized, and when recognition came, it came in a rush.

The Friend and the National Book Award

That rush arrived with The Friend (2018), the novel that introduced Nunez to a vastly wider readership. Narrated by a writer mourning a close friend and unexpectedly left to care for his enormous Great Dane, the book became a critical sensation and a New York Times bestseller, and it won the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel's success sent readers back to explore the rest of Nunez's catalog, revealing a writer who had been doing quietly extraordinary work for decades before the wider world caught up.

Honors, Film, and a Body of Work Still Growing

Nunez's honors extend well beyond the National Book Award, including the Whiting Award, the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. She was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her work has crossed into film, most notably as the basis for Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door (2024). She has taught at Princeton, Columbia, and The New School, passing along the same discipline that carried her from a childhood in public housing to the top of American letters.

Selected Bibliography

Fiction

• A Feather on the Breath of God (1995) — Nunez's debut novel, drawing on her mixed cultural heritage to follow a young woman navigating identity between her immigrant parents' worlds and her own.

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  Naked Sleeper (1996) — A novel of a woman's unraveling marriage and the reckoning that follows.

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  Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (1998) — A playful, inventive account of Leonard and Virginia Woolf's pet marmoset, and the literary world that surrounded them.

  
  

• For Rouenna (2001) — The story of a writer drawn into the war experiences of a childhood friend who served as a nurse in Vietnam.

  
  

• The Last of Her Kind (2006) — A sweeping novel tracing the diverging lives of two Barnard College roommates across decades of American upheaval.

  
  

• Salvation City (2010) — A speculative novel set in the aftermath of a pandemic, following an orphaned boy taken in by an evangelical family.

  
  

• The Friend (2018) — Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction. A grieving writer inherits her late friend's Great Dane, and finds an unexpected path through loss.

  
  

• What Are You Going Through (2020) — A woman agrees to keep a dying friend company through her final days, in a novel about mortality and companionship.

  
  

• The Vulnerables (2023) — Set in the early days of the pandemic, following a writer, a wayward young man, and a parrot thrown together in isolation.

Memoir

• Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag (2011) — A concise, candid recollection of Nunez's youthful friendship with Susan Sontag, for whom she once worked as an assistant.

READ NUNEZ

Start with The Friend if you want the book that introduced Sigrid Nunez to the world, or A Feather on the Breath of God if you want to meet the writer at the very beginning, already working through the questions of identity and belonging that would define her career. Either way, you'll find a voice shaped in part by a childhood spent in Brooklyn's public housing, and it's exactly the kind of Brooklyn story this series exists to honor. Get the book

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