American · b. 1989
Emma Cline is an American novelist and short story writer, born in 1989 in Sonoma County, California, into a family of winemakers, the second of seven siblings. She studied at Middlebury College and earned an MFA from Columbia University before her debut novel, The Girls (2016), a fictionalized account of a young woman drawn into a Manson-like cult, became a bestseller and finalist for the National Book Critics Circles John Leonard Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and The Paris Review, and she has won the Plimpton Prize and an O. Henry Award; Granta named her one of its Best Young American Novelists. Daddy (2020), a story collection, and The Guest (2023), her second novel about a young woman drifting through a wealthy Long Island summer, extended her interest in outsiders navigating other peoples money and attention. Her fiction is known for cool, precise prose and a sustained fascination with vulnerability, performance, and class.