Life Through the Reading Lens

Gina Apostol's third book, Gun Dealers' Daughter, won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). Her newest novel on the Filipino-American War, Insurrecto, is forthcoming in November from Soho Press. Her essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, and others. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Philippines. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City.

Photo credit: Margarita Corporan

Kathleen Hill is the author of two previous novels. Her first novel, Still Waters in Niger, was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune. It was also selected for The Quality Paperback Book Club. The French translation, Eaux Tranquilles, was shortlisted for the Prix Femina Etranger. Her second novel, Who Occupies This House, was an editor’s choice at the New York Times Book Review. One essay included in She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons was selected as one of the Best American Short Stories as well as The Pushcart Prize XXV and The Pushcart Book of Short Stories. Another, published in Ploughshares, was selected as One of the Best Kindle Singles of 2014. She teaches in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College.

Belinda McKeon's most recent novel is Tender (2015), which was shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year and the Encore Award. Her debut, Solace, was published in 2011 and won the Faber Prize as well as being named Irish Book of the Year. Her fiction and non-fiction have been published in The Paris Review, Granta, the New York Times and elsewhere. She is also a playwright, and her most recent play, Nora, a new version of Ibsen's A Doll's House, was staged at this year's Dublin Theatre Festival. She lives in upstate New York and teaches at Rutgers University. 

Photo credit: Alen MacWeeney