Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides "whose small, nearly perfect first novel The Virgin Suicides reflects a Greek tragic sensibility with its chorus-like self-immolating young heroines" was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1960.

In contrast to The Virgin Suicides, a precise tale of accelerating grief filmed by Sophia Coppola, Eugenides' new novel Middlesex develops over decades, exploring the riddle of identity. Selected by the New York Times as one of the three finest American novels published last year, Middlesex is "a transatlantic epic about a star-crossed Hellenic family narrated by an engagingly ironic hermaphrodite".

"Only the need for this new thing to enter the world and hence the heart's rigged game."

Jeffrey Eugenides presently lives in Berlin.