Jenny Offill

Weather was shortlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction.

In 2020, Offill makes her home in the Hudson Valley.

"I went to UNC-Chapel Hill as an undergraduate and I studied with Doris Betts, Jill McCorkle and Robert Kirkpatrick among others. All three were great mentors to me as a young writer. Later, I got a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. My big influence there was Gilbert Sorrentino..." —Jenny Offill, to Ellen Birkett Morris

"I have always liked compressed and fragmentary forms. I trace it back to my mind being blown by John Berryman when I was nineteen." —Jenny Offill, about Dept. of Speculation

In 2008, Offill, 39, a writer and creative writing teacher at Brooklyn College and Columbia University, and her partner, David Hirme, 37, a Web director for Channel 13, a public television station, lived in Brooklyn with their daughter, Thea, 3.

Offill's first novel, Last Things, was published in 1999 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and in the UK by Bloomsbury. It was a New York Times Notable book and a finalist for the L.A Times First Book Award. Offill's second novel, Dept. of Speculation, was published in January 2014 and was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review. Dept. of Speculation has been shortlisted for the Folio Prize in the UK, the Pen/Faulkner Award and the L.A. Times Fiction Award. In 2016 Offill was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Jenny Offill (born 1968) is an American novelist and editor. Her novel Dept. of Speculation was named one of "The 10 Best Books of 2014" by The New York Times Book Review.