“I'm not a wildly gifted person; I don't play an instrument or speak another language or have great accomplishments in another field, as many writers do. But writing feels natural to me; the act of it seems to free up my unconscious, so that sometimes I feel that I have access to more ideas and information than my conscious mind could think up.”

American novelist and short-story writer

Jennifer Egan is an American novelist and short-story writer. She is best known for her fiction, especially the novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. From 2018 to 2020, Egan served as president of PEN America. Her reputation rests on fiction and on work that has earned major literary recognition.