Claire Messud reads from her novel The Woman Upstairs, published in April 2013. After her reading, Claire discusses her work with Duncan White, Resident Fellow at Wellesley's Newhouse Center for the Humanities. Claire was born in the United States in 1966 to a French father and a Canadian mother, and was raised in Sydney, Australia and Toronto, Canada, before returning to the States in 1980. Educated at Yale and Cambridge universities, she lived in London until 1995, where she was Deputy Editor of the Guardian newspaper’s Women’s Page. Claire has taught at various colleges and universities, including Amherst College and Kenyon College, and in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. Her first novel, When the World Was Steady, and her book of novellas, The Hunters, were finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award; her second novel, The Last Life, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and Editor’s Choice at The Village Voice; all three books were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her novel, The Emperor’s Children, was on several best books of the year lists, including the Los Angeles Times, Economist, Chicago Tribune, and People magazine, and was named one of the “10 Best Books of the Year” for 2006 by the New York Times Book Review. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, and the Straus Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.