Ottessa Moshfegh
Birth nameOttessa Charlotte Moshfegh
Birth dateMay 20, 1981 (age 45)
Birth placeBoston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Occupation
  • Novelist
  • writer
NationalityAmerican
Alma materBarnard College (BA)
Brown University (MFA)
Genre
  • Fiction
  • essays
NotableworksEileen
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Websiteottessathisottessathat.substack.com

Ottessa Charlotte Moshfegh (/oʊˈtɛsəˈmɒʃfɛɡ/;[1][2] born May 20, 1981) is an American author and novelist.[3] Her debut novel, Eileen (2015), won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a fiction finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.[4] Moshfegh's subsequent novels include My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Death in Her Hands, and Lapvona.

Early life and education

Moshfegh was born in 1981 and raised in Boston, Massachusetts.[5] Her mother was Croatian and her father an Iranian Jew[6][7] and both were musicians who taught at the New England Conservatory of Music. As a child, Moshfegh learned to play piano and clarinet.[4]

Moshfegh attended the Commonwealth School in Boston[8] and earned a BA in English from Barnard College in 2002.[9] In 2011, she completed an MFA in Literary Arts at Brown University,[9] where she also taught undergraduates, including Antonia Angress.[10] From 2013 to 2015, Moshfegh was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University.[11][12]

Career

After college, Moshfegh moved to China, where she taught English and worked in a punk bar.[4] In her mid-twenties, she relocated to New York City, working for Overlook Press and later as an assistant to Jean Stein. After contracting cat-scratch fever, she left the city and pursued an MFA at Brown University.[4] During those years, she supported herself by selling vintage clothing, which she has described as mostly "tea dresses."[13]

Works

In 2014, Fence Books published Moshfegh's novella McGlue, the first winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose.[14] In August 2015, Penguin Press published her first full-length novel, Eileen, which received favorable reviews[15][16] and was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize.[17] In Eileen, the protagonist and narrator recounts a series of events from her youth in a Massachusetts town she calls "X-ville". At the start of the novel, she works as a secretary at a local juvenile prison while living with and caring for her abusive father, a retired police officer struggling with alcoholism and paranoia. As the story continues, the circumstances that led her to leave X-ville are revealed.

Homesick for Another World, a collection of short stories, was published in January 2017.[18] On July 10, 2018, Penguin Press published Moshfegh's second novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation. The book describes a young art history graduate living in New York City over a 15-month period starting in mid-June 2000.[19] Recently graduated and ambivalently mourning her parents' deaths, she quits her job as a gallerist and embarks on a yearlong plan to sleep, aided by sleeping pills and other medications prescribed by a dubious psychiatrist.[19]

Also in 2018, Moshfegh wrote a piece for Granta in which she recounted an experience with a much older male writer when she was 17 years old.[20] She is a frequent contributor to the Paris Review, having published eight stories in the journal since 2012.[21][22] In 2020, Vintage published her third novel, Death in Her Hands,[23] which Moshfegh has called "a loneliness story".[11]

In 2021, Moshfegh's short story "My New Novel" was published as a stand-alone artbook by Picture Books, an imprint of Gagosian. The book features a foldout painting by Issy Wood illustrating "the most directly surreal part of the story".[24] In 2022, Penguin Press published Moshfegh's fourth novel, Lapvona, which follows Marek, the abused son of a shepherd, along with other characters from the fictional medieval fiefdom of Lapvona.[25]

Moshfegh co-wrote the 2022 drama film Causeway with Luke Goebel and Elizabeth Sanders.[26] It premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival.[27]

Personal life

Moshfegh was married to the writer Luke B. Goebel, whom she met during an interview.[28] As of 2020, they were living in Pasadena, California.[29] She has cited the poet and novelist Charles Bukowski as an influence on her work. Like Moshfegh, Bukowski created characters who were considered socially deprived and isolated.[30] In 2026, Moshfegh announced she and Goebel were separated.[31]

Awards and honors

Bibliography

Novels

Short fiction

Novellas

  • McGlue (2014)
  • My New Novel (2021)

Filmography

References

  1. ^ "Ottessa Moshfegh's 3 Favorite Wanderers and Weirdos". The Dinner Part Download. American Public Media. February 10, 2017. Retrieved December 2, 2022.
  2. ^ "Ottessa Moshfegh". 10 Things That Scare Me. WNYC Studios. December 4, 2018. Retrieved December 2, 2022.
  3. ^ Novak, Joanna (November 3, 2014). "Ottessa Moshfegh Is the Next Big Thing, and Here Are 7 Reasons Why". Bustle. Retrieved April 13, 2015.
  4. ^ Levy, Ariel. "Ottessa Moshfegh's Otherworldly Fiction". The New Yorker. Retrieved July 3, 2018.
  5. ^ Moshfegh, Ottessa (February 28, 2016). "Ottessa Moshfegh: I didn’t set out to write Eileen as a noir novel". The Guardian. Retrieved June 1, 2017.
  6. ^ "Character Finds A Path Out of Her Personal Prison In 'Eileen'". NPR. August 15, 2015. Retrieved August 15, 2015.
  7. ^ White, Duncan (August 5, 2018). "Ottessa Moshfegh: why I wrote the story of a girl who tried to sleep for a year". The Telegraph. Archived March 28, 2021 at the Wayback Machine.
  8. ^ Sullivan, James (2017-01-24). "The moral to her stories is... not there". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 2021-05-18.
  9. ^ "Ottessa Moshfegh | Literary Arts Program". www.brown.edu. Archived from the original on May 19, 2021. Retrieved 2021-05-19.
  10. ^ "Antonia Angress, "Sirens & Muses," | Reading the Room". YouTube. The Bar and the Bookcase. August 9, 2022. (See 34:04 of 39:22 in video.)
  11. ^ Christensen, Lauren (2020-04-16). "Ottessa Moshfegh Is Only Human". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-05-18.
  12. ^ "Former Stegner Fellows | Creative Writing Program". stanford.edu. Retrieved October 18, 2023.
  13. ^ Phillips, Kaitlin (July 19, 2018). "Ottessa Moshfegh Plays to Win". The Cut. Retrieved April 29, 2022.
  14. ^ "McGlue Otessa Moshfeg | Fence Books". www.fenceportal.org. Retrieved 2021-05-19.
  15. ^ "Eileen: A Novel". Penguin Press
  16. ^ King, Lily (August 14, 2015). "'Eileen,' by Ottessa Moshfegh". The New York Times. Retrieved August 14, 2015.
  17. ^ Laity, Paul (September 16, 2016). "Ottessa Moshfegh interview: 'Eileen started out as a joke – also I'm broke, also I want to be famous'". The Guardian
  18. ^ Sarah Shaffi (September 19, 2014). "Two from Moshfegh for Cape". The Bookseller
  19. ^ "My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh – caustic and acute". the Guardian. 2018-07-22. Retrieved 2021-05-18.
  20. ^ "Jailbait". Granta Magazine. 2018-08-09. Retrieved 2019-09-06.
  21. ^ Stein, Lorin (October 28, 2014). "Ottessa Moshfegh". BOMB Magazine. Retrieved October 18, 2023.
  22. ^ "Ottessa Moshfegh". The Paris Review. Retrieved 2025-10-02.
  23. ^ "Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh review – meandering murder mystery". the Guardian. 2020-10-09. Retrieved 2021-05-18.
  24. ^ "My New Novel / The down payment". Gagosian Shop. Retrieved 2025-10-17.
  25. ^ "Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh". Kirkus Reviews. March 30, 2022. Retrieved November 26, 2022.
  26. ^ "Causeway". Writers Guild of America East. Retrieved 15 August 2022.
  27. ^ Brunner, Raven (October 7, 2022). "'Causeway' on Apple TV+: Trailer, Cast, Premiere Date and More". Decider. Retrieved April 12, 2024.
  28. ^ Phillips, Kaitlin (July 19, 2018). "Ottessa Moshfegh Plays to Win". The Cut. Retrieved March 2, 2019.
  29. ^ "You're Probably Wrong About Ottessa Moshfegh"
  30. ^ "Ottessa Moshfegh | Biography, Books, Eileen, & Facts | Britannica". www.britannica.com. 2024-03-23. Retrieved 2024-04-23.
  31. ^ https://substack.com/@ottessa/note/c-245043463?r=17jaa
  32. ^ "The Believer Book Award". The Believer. November 2015. Retrieved November 23, 2015.
  33. ^ "Ottessa Moshfegh - Artist". MacDowell. Retrieved 2025-08-15.
  34. ^ Mark Shanahan (March 16, 2016). "Newton's Ottessa Moshfegh wins 2016 PEN/Hemingway Award". Boston Globe. Retrieved June 22, 2016.
  35. ^ Treisman, Deborah (December 28, 2015). "This Week in Fiction: Ottessa Moshfegh on the Repressed Western Consciousness". The New Yorker
  36. ^ Livingstone, Josephine (January–February 2017). "Ordinary monsters: Ottessa Moshfegh plots twisted fairy tales for an age of alienation.". The New Republic. 248 (1–2): 59–60.