Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado was raised by her parents in Allentown, an hour north of Philadelphia. She now lives in Philadelphia with her wife and is Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.

Carmen’s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties (2017), won a number of awards and was a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2018, the collection was chosen by the New York Times as one of ‘15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21^st century’.

Carmen says that she is ‘interested in messing with genres’ and cites her influences as Ray Bradbury, Angela Carter and Yōko Ogawa. She was also heavily influenced by Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude which she was given to read by an ‘insightful and amazing English teacher’ in high school.