Jennifer Egan is a renowned American novelist and short-story writer born on September 7, 1962, in Chicago, Illinois. She is acclaimed for her exceptional contribution to contemporary literature.

Egan's novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, received the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, became a New York Times bestseller and earned the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. It was also chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York read.

Her latest novel, The Candy House, a sibling to A Visit From the Goon Squad, was published recently and was named one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2022 and listed among President Obama’s favorite reads of the year.

Jennifer Egan's other notable works include The Invisible Circus, which became a feature film starring Cameron Diaz in 2001, Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2001, and Emerald City and Other Stories, The Keep.

Egan is also a prolific journalist, contributing frequently to the New York Times Magazine. Her 2002 cover story on homeless children won the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and "The Bipolar Kid" received a 2009 NAMI Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Her in-depth report on street homelessness and supportive housing in New York City was published in The New Yorker in September 2023.

She has served as the President of PEN America and twice as Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania. Her academic involvement extends to teaching courses in 19th and 20th Century literature.

In addition to her Pulitzer Prize, Egan is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library.