Maggie Shipstead

Biography

Maggie Shipstead is the author of two novels: Astonish Me (Knopf, 2014) and Seating Arrangements (Knopf, 2012), which was a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. She has been a National Magazine Award finalist in fiction and a contributor to The Best American Short Stories. 

See Work

FICTION / Winter 2017

Backcountry

By Maggie Shipstead ,  Illustration by Kristen Radtke

When Ingrid was twenty-five, she lived for four months in a big house on the edge of an unfinished—never to be finished—ski resort. This was in Montana, on Adelaide Peak, twenty years ago. Richie, her much older kind-of boyfriend, and...
#VQRTRUESTORY / Summer 2016

The Truths of Antarctica

By Maggie Shipstead
FICTION / Fall 2012

Labor

By Maggie Shipstead
FICTION / Fall 2011

La Moretta

By Maggie Shipstead

Bill and Lyla had graduated, gotten married, and departed directly for Europe. Lyla’s parents had given them a thousand dollars to spend on a honeymoon, sowing the seeds for months of argument. Bill wanted an adventure, but Lyla, who had...

FICTION / Fall 2009

The Cowboy Tango

By Maggie Shipstead

When Mr. Glen Otterbausch hired Sammy Boone she was sixteen and so skinny that the whole of her beanpole body fit neatly inside the circle of shade cast by her hat.