| Catherine Lacey | |
| Native Name Lang: | English |
| Birth Date: | 9 April 1985 |
| Birth Place: | Tupelo, Mississippi, U.S. |
| Occupation: | Novelist |
| Language: | English |
| Education: | Columbia University |
| Notableworks: | Biography of X, |
| Notablework: | -->Pew |
| Notablework: | --> |
| Awards: | Whiting Award, Guggenheim Fellowship |
Catherine Lacey (born April 9, 1985) is an American writer.
Lacey's first novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Dwight Garner, in The New York Times, called her prose "dreamy and fierce at the same time." Time Out named it "the (hands down) best book of the year." It also made The New Yorkers list for the best books of 2014. It has been translated into Dutch,[1] Spanish,[2] Italian,[3] French,[4] and German.[5] The novel was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award.[6] In 2016, Lacey won a Whiting Award for her fiction.[7]
In 2017 Lacey was named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists. Her second novel, The Answers (2017), was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It received several positive reviews and comparisons to Don DeLillo and Margaret Atwood.[8] [9] In an interview with Vogue, Lacey said, "Even the person who wrote Nobody Is Ever Missing, I can’t really speak on her behalf anymore. The text is kind of what's left of that person, and that person doesn’t exist anymore. It both makes me very uncomfortable and very relaxed, because who you are and what you think that you’re attached to vanishes very quickly."[10] Lacey was a founding member of 3B, a cooperatively owned and operated bed and breakfast in downtown Brooklyn, where she lived as she wrote her first novel.[11] In 2012, Lacey won an Artists' Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts[12] that she credits in giving her the financial freedom to finish Nobody Is Ever Missing.[13]
Her 2020 novel, Pew, was shortlisted for the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize[14] and won the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award.[15]
In 2023, she published her fourth novel Biography of X, a fictional biography. The New Statesman described it as a book that "thrillingly subverts the conventions of life-writing."[16] Time named it among "the 100 must-read books of 2023."[17] It was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2024.[18]
She has an upcoming debut nonfiction work, titled The Möbius Book, as well as an upcoming second short story collection, My Stalkers.
In August 2015, she married actor and teacher Peter Musante; they divorced the next year. Lacey was partnered with writer Jesse Ball from 2016 to 2021.[19] She has taught at Columbia University in the Writing Program at the School of the Arts.[20]