Great Believers (Makkai) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—April 20, 1978
• Rasied—Lake Bluff, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Washington and Lee University; M.F.A., Middlebury College
• Awards—Pushcart Prize
• Currently—lives near Chicago, Illinois


Rebecca Makkai is an American novelist and short-story writer, who grew up in Lake Bluff, Illinois. She is the daughter of linguistics professors Valerie Becker Makkai and Adam Makkai. Her paternal grandmother, Ignacz Rozsa, was a well-known actress and novelist in Hungary.

Makkai graduated from Washington and Lee University with a BA in English, and subsequently earned a master's degree from Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English. She lives with her husband and two daughters near Chicago, Illinois.

Her first novel, The Borrower, released in 2011, was a Booklist Top Ten Debut, an Indie Next pick, an O Magazine selection, and one of Chicago Magazine's choices for best fiction of 2011. It translated into seven languages.

Makkai's second novel, The Hundred-Year House, set in the Northern suburbs of Chicago, won the 2015 Novel of the Year award from the Chicago Writers Association.

Her novel about the AIDS epidemic in 1980s Chicago, titled The Great Believers, was published in 2018. It also received wide acclaim.

Makkai's short stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 and as well as in "The Best American Nonrequired Reading" 2009 and 2016; she received a 2017 Pushcart Prize and a 2014 NEA fellowship.

Her fiction has also appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, The Threepenny Review, New England Review, and Shenandoah. Her nonfiction has appeared in Harpers and on Salon.com and the New Yorker website. Makkai's stories have also been featured on Public Radio International's Selected Shorts and This American Life.

She has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Northwestern University, Lake Forest College, Sierra Nevada College, and StoryStudio Chicago. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/22/2018.)