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The U.S. Embassy Literature Series: Where Do Novels Come From? About Writing and Creativity

Lauren Groff and Lorrie Moore in Conversation with Gregor Dotzauer

Lauren Groff is the ELLEN MARIA GORRISSEN FELLOW – CLASS OF SPRING 2023 at the American Academy in Berlin. She is the author of six books of fiction, the most recent the novel MATRIX (September 2021). Her work has won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award and France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne, was a three-time finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and twice for the Kirkus Prize and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Prize, the Southern Book Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Lorrie Moore is currently the MARY ELLEN VON DER HEYDEN FELLOW IN FICTION – CLASS OF SPRING 2023 at the American Academy in Berlin. She is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and Creative Writing at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of two short story collections, three novels and a children’s novel. Her new novel I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home (June 2023) has been listed as one of the most anticipated books of 2023 by Time Magazine. Lorrie Moore has won numerous awards such as the O. Henry Award, The Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction.  She has been a finalist for the Orange Prize, The PEN Faulkner Award, The National Book Critics’ Circle Award, The Story Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. See What Can Be Done (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018) is a collection of her reviews and essays that previously appeared in publications such as The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Yale Review and The Atlantic. A recipient of an NEA, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, the Berlin Prize and a Pushcart Prize, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006.

Gregor Dotzauer is lead editor for nonfiction at Berlin’s Tagesspiegel.  He studied German, philosophy and musicology in Würzburg and Frankfurt am Main before beginning to write about literature and film for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Zeit and the Süddeutsche Zeitung. In 1999, he joined Berlin’s Tagesspiegel as literary editor, where he also regularly writes on topics related to jazz or the humanities. In 2009, he received the Alfred Kerr Prize for Literary Criticism. In October 2022, Matthes & Seitz published his literary essay “Schläft ein Lied in allen Dingen – Über Musik, Moment und Erinnerung” (A Song Sleeps In All Things – On Music, Moment and Memory).