More about Lily

Lily King grew up in Massachusetts and received her B.A. in English Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her M.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. After grad school she took a job as a high school English teacher in Valencia, Spain and began writing her first novel. Eight years, ten more moves all over the US,  and many bookstore, restaurant and teaching jobs later, that novel was published as The Pleasing Hour in 1999.  

The Pleasing Hour won the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, was a New York Times Notable Book and an alternate for the PEN/Hemingway Award. It was followed by The English Teacher (2005) and was a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year, a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year, and the winner of the Maine Fiction Award. Her third novel, Father of the Rain (2010), was a New York Times Editors Choice, a Publishers Weekly Best Novel of the Year and winner of both the New England Book Award for Fiction and the Maine Fiction Award.  Her fourth novel, Euphoria (2014), won the Kirkus Award for Fiction 2014, the New England Book Award for Fiction 2014 and was a finalist in the National Book Critics Circle Awards. Euphoria was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times Book Review. It was included in TIME's Top 10 Fiction Books of 2014 and the Amazon Best Books of 2014. Reviewed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, Emily Eakin called Euphoria, “a taut, witty, fiercely intelligent tale of competing egos and desires in a landscape of exotic menace.” It has been optioned by the BBC as a limited series.

Her most recent novel, Writers & Lovers, was published on March 3rd, 2020, and her first collection of short stories, Five Tuesdays in Winter, will be released on November 9, 2021.

Lily’s first short story was published in Glimmer Train in 1991. Other stories, essays, and reviews have since appeared in a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, The Los Angeles Review of Books, One Story, The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and several anthologies. Her novels have been published in 20 languages.

In 1995 she met a guy named Tyler at her friend Bernardine’s house in Belmont, Mass. They married in 1998. They have two daughters and two dogs and live in Portland, Maine.