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Jeffrey Eugenides United States of America    PWF 2003

Jeffrey Eugenides "whose small, nearly perfect first novel The Virgin Suicides reflects a Greek tragic sensibility with its chorus-like self-immolating young heroines" was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1960.

He graduated from Brown University in 1983 and from Stanford University with an M.A. in Creative Writing. The Virgin Suicides was published in 1993 and adapted for film in 1999.

In contrast to The Virgin Suicides, a precise tale of accelerating grief filmed by Sofia Coppola, Eugenides' new novel Middlesex (2002) develops over decades, exploring the riddle of identity. Selected by The New York Times as one of the three finest American novels published that year, Middlesex is "a transatlantic epic about a star-crossed Hellenic family narrated by an engagingly ironic hermaphrodite". Part of the novel is set in Berlin, where Eugenides lived from 1999 until 2004. Middlesex was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize and Ambassador Book Award.

Jeffrey Eugenides currently lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife and daughter, where he is a member of Princeton University’s Creative Writing faculty.