About the Author

Michelle Richmond is the New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author of six novels and two award-winning story collections.

Her new novel, Animals of the French Species, inspired by her years as an expat in Paris, will be published by Grove Atlantic in January 2027.

Animals is the second standalone novel in the Lina Connerly series. The first, The Wonder Test, is a sharply written, subtly satirical thriller (Booklist, starred review), featuring FBI Agent Lina Connerly, whose skills at international spycraft help her navigate the treacherous Silicon Valley suburbs.

Michelle’s previous books include the 2017 Sunday Times bestseller The Marriage Pact, published in 31 languages; Golden State, which imagines modern-day California on the brink of secession from the United States; the international bestseller The Year of Fog; and the story collection Hum, winner of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Glimmer Train, Playboy, Oxford American, Boulevard, and elsewhere.

Michelle was born and raised in Alabama and lives in Northern California. She holds an MFA from the University of Miami, where she was a James Michener Fellow. She is the recipient of the Truman Capote Prize for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer of the Short Story, the Hall-Waters Prize for significant contributions to Southern literature, and the Grace Paley Prize for Fiction. She is currently at work on a memoir of her expat years in Paris, which happened to collide with the longest transit strikes in half a century, 18 months of yellow vest protests, and the pandemic.

Books, in order of publication

Personal bio

I grew up the middle of three sisters in Mobile, Alabama. We spent vacations in Gatlinburg, TN, Disney World, and with my grandparents in Brookhaven, Mississippi.

At the University of Alabama, I majored in Journalism and English. As the managing editor of the university’s yearbook, I published what I suppose was technically my first book, a collector’s edition bound in red velvet celebrating the university’s centennial. I was also a founding member of the university’s undergraduate literary magazine, Marr’s Field Journal, which is still in publication today.

After working in advertising, magazines, and restaurants in Knoxville and Atlanta, I moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to “study” in the MFA program in creative writing. During my first week there, I met a guy named Kevin from San Francisco, crawled through his window in the middle of the night, and decided he was the one. This might be a sordid one-night-stand story, except for the fact that we have now been together for 26 years.

I transferred to the University of Miami, where I completed my MFA, taught creative writing, and wrote my first story collection in a studio apartment on the beach. Then I joined Kevin in New York City, and eventually followed him to San Francisco. We married in a small ceremony in Yosemite in the winter of 2001.

We bought our first house in Daly City, possibly the foggiest place on earth (hence, The Year of Fog). A couple of years later, we traded it for a smaller house in San Francisco’s Richmond district — the model for the home in Golden State as well as The Marriage Pact.

Every place I have lived has eventually made it into one of my books. So too with the small town near Silicon Valley where we now live, the inspiration for The Wonder Test. I’m now at work on a novel and memoir set in Paris. Every place tells a story.