Matt Ruff

Lovecraft Country was nominated World Fantasy Award in 2017 for the Novel category.

His fifth book, an alternate history novel titled The Mirage, was published in February 2012. The Mirage was nominated for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History.

His fourth novel, Bad Monkeys, received the 2008 Washington State Book Award for Fiction, a PNBA Book Award, and an Alex Award.

His third book Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls, focuses on two protagonists displaying a fictionalised version of dissociative identity disorder; while not technically science-fiction, it nonetheless contains significant speculative elements. The novel was long-listed for the 2005 International Dublin Literary Award and won the 2007 James Tiptree, Jr. Award, a PNBA Book Award, and a Washington State Book Award. Ruff is also the recipient of a 2006 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Prose

Ruff grew up in New York City. From third to eighth grade, Ruff attended a parochial school. He attended Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan; one of his teachers there was the memoirist Frank McCourt. He graduated from Cornell University in 1987. Alison Lurie was one of Ruff's English professors, and she helped Ruff find an agent.

Ruff's first sustained effort at a novel was a soap opera-like story about a family with a lot of children (having only older half siblings, Ruff was fascinated by the concept of siblings). He wrote it in the 1970s, but never published it. Describing it, Ruff said "Think Eight Is Enough with surreal elements. There was no overall plot, just a series of loosely linked episodes—a chapter about the boys and girls digging competing tunnel systems under the house would be followed by one in which they got infected by some weird flu strain and started passing out in the halls. Periodically I’d set aside what I’d written and start the whole thing over again".

In the late 1970s/early 1980s, Ruff wrote a fantasy novel. He came very close to finishing it, and even completed thirteen out of a planned sixteen chapters. However, he gave up, deciding it was not that great a story. Between 1982 and 1984, Ruff wrote a semi-autobiographical novel about a Lutheran Minister's son who questions his faith. Part of Ruff's motive for writing the novel was to let his parents know he wasn't going to be a devout Christian, which they had hoped he would. In 1985, Ruff wrote a coming-of-age story set in Queens called "Today's Tom Sawyer", over the summer between his sophomore and junior years at Cornell. It had upwards of 400 pages, and Ruff wrote in three months. Ruff used a female student in his class as a character in the story, and gave her a copy of the finished manuscript.

Matthew Theron "Matt" Ruff (born September 8, 1965 in Queens, New York) is an American author of thriller, science-fiction and comic novels.

Ruff was born in New York City in 1965. His family are Lutheran, and he has German ancestry. His father was a hospital chaplain, and his mother was a missionary's daughter. At the age of 5, he decided he wanted to be a fiction writer. He spent his childhood and adolescence learning how to tell stories. As a child, many adults around him did not take his desire to become a writer seriously, and attempted to persuade him to choose a different career. However, Ruff's mother was very supportive of him and his hope to become a writer; for one of Ruff's birthdays, she bought him an IBM Selectric typewriter.