Lauren Groff

Lauren Groff is an American novelist and short-story writer raised in Cooperstown, New York. A graduate of Amherst College and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, she began her career with The Monsters of Templeton, a novel that reimagines her hometown. Her fiction ranges from contemporary marriage and domestic life to medieval Europe and early colonial America.

Groff writes literary and historical fiction with a strong sense of place. Her work repeatedly tests human ambition against the natural world, while returning to faith, power and women seeking room beyond prescribed roles. Fates and Furies recounts a marriage from sharply different perspectives; Florida finds danger and estrangement beneath the state’s heat and lush growth; Matrix follows an exiled woman who reshapes an impoverished abbey.

Fates and Furies, Florida and Matrix were National Book Award finalists. Florida also won the Story Prize. Across novels and short fiction, Groff is known for sensuous physical detail and narrative structures that reveal how partial any single account can be.

Start with The Vaster Wilds. Set in early seventeenth-century Virginia, it follows a servant girl fleeing a starving colonial settlement with little beyond her intelligence and determination. Its wilderness journey offers suspense, but the novel also confronts colonialism, religious belief and the limits of human dominion. It is a concentrated introduction to Groff’s historical imagination and her attention to bodies under pressure.