Lisa Halliday

Lisa Halliday
Lisa at the Frankfurt Book Fair (2018)
Born (1976-07-12) July 12, 1976 (age 48)
Medfield, Massachusetts, U.S.
Alma materHarvard University
OccupationAuthor
Years active1997-present
Notable workAsymmetry
Spouse
Theo
​
(m. 2009)​
Children1
AwardsWhiting Award

Lisa Halliday (born July 12, 1976) is an American author and novelist. She is most known for her novel Asymmetry, for which she received a Whiting Award in 2017.[1][2][3][4]

Life

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Halliday was born and grew up in Medfield, Massachusetts, in a working-class family. Her ancestors come from Campania, Italy. Her father was a mechanic and a repairman, and her mother worked as a seamstress.[5] In 1981, when she was 5 years old, her parents divorced. She and her sister moved in with her mother and her then-boyfriend, who started an extermination business together, later married.[6] Halliday excelled in school and got into study at Harvard, making herself the first person in her immediate family to go to college.[6] While studying art history at Harvard, she lived in Cambridge and Somerville in Massachusetts.[7] After graduation in 1998, she moved to Manhattan and got a job as an assistant literary agent at The Wylie Agency, and later was promoted.[8] She lived there for over a decade. She met Philip Roth at the agency and entered a relationship with him.[9][10][11] In 2006, she left the agency and started focusing on her fiction. She did some freelance editing and ghostwriting to support herself financially. In 2009, she married British editor and translator, Theo, with whom she had worked in the same literary agency. In 2011, she moved to Milan with her husband, and in 2017 they had a daughter.[7]

Career

[edit]
Halliday in 2018

Halliday started writing amateur short stories and books in the mid-1990s. In 1997, while studying at Harvard, she wrote The Unofficial Guide to Life at Harvard 1997-1998. In 2005, her short story Stump Louie appeared in the Paris Review.[12][8] Halliday published her debut novel, Asymmetry, in 2018, for which she received a Whiting Award in the fiction category.[13] The book was published by Simon & Schuster in February 2018. The book was named as one of the top ten books of 2018 by The New York Times,[14] The New Yorker, Time, and several other publications. Barack Obama included the book in his list of best books from 2018.[15]

References

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  1. ^ "Lisa Halliday". bookreporter.com. Retrieved 2021-05-11.
  2. ^ "Lisa Halliday - Events - Harvard Book Store". Harvard University. Retrieved 2021-05-11.
  3. ^ Krüger, Karen. "Schriftstellerin Lisa Halliday: Das ganze Buch war angsteinflößend!". Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (in German). ISSN 0174-4909. Retrieved 2021-05-11.
  4. ^ "Asymmetry review: A novel that puts a refreshing trust in its readers". The Irish Times. Retrieved 2021-05-11.
  5. ^ "Meet the new faces of fiction for 2018". The Guardian. 2018-01-14. Retrieved 2021-05-11. Born in Medfield, a small town 45 minutes outside Boston, to a mechanic father and a mother who started out as a seamstress.
  6. ^ a b Alter, Alexandra (2018-02-02). "Lisa Halliday's Debut Novel Is Drawing Comparisons to Philip Roth. Though Not for the Reasons You Might Think". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-05-11.
  7. ^ a b "A Conversation with Lisa Halliday, an American Writer in Milan". Easy Milano. 2021-01-13. Retrieved 2021-05-11.
  8. ^ a b Lorentzen, Christian (2018-02-07). "Lisa Halliday's Tremendous New Experiment of a Novel". Vulture. Retrieved 2021-05-13.
  9. ^ Alter, Alexandra (2018-03-30). "Lisa Halliday's controversial first novel mines her affair with Philip Roth". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 2021-05-11.
  10. ^ Paskin, Willa (2018-05-23). "Eulogies for Philip Roth Don't Get Much More Loving Than Lisa Halliday's Novel". Slate. Retrieved 2021-05-11.
  11. ^ "Philip Roth in the #MeToo Era". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2021-05-13.
  12. ^ Halliday, Lisa (2005). "Stump Louie". The Paris Review. Vol. Summer 2005, no. 174. ISSN 0031-2037. Retrieved 2021-05-10.
  13. ^ "Lisa Halliday". Whiting Awards. Retrieved 2021-05-11.
  14. ^ Gregory, Alice (2018-02-12). "Three Lives, and the Tenuous Ties That Bind Them". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-05-11.
  15. ^ Caron, Christina (2018-12-28). "Barack Obama's Favorite Book of 2018 Was 'Becoming.' Here's What Else He Liked". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-05-11.
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