Terese Svoboda is the author of 24 books of fiction, poetry, memoir, biography, and translation, most recently the PW-starred Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, her second memoir.
Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Bomb, Paris Review, NY Times and its review, Granta, and many other magazines. She has won the Guggenheim, the Bobst Prize in fiction, the Iowa Poetry Prize, an NEH translation grant, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, a Jerome Foundation video prize, the O. Henry Award for the short story, and a Pushcart Prize for the essay.
At MacDowell in 2013, she enlarged the 56 pages of Irish Princess, the beginnings of a novel that won her a Guggenheim. The story is about a young girl and a member of the peerage who emigrates with a priest to Jamaica. During her 2022 residency, Svoboda wrote 100 pages of Goose Girl, her ninth novel, combining the fairytale of six brothers who become enchanted geese and the 2016 death of 10,000 geese at Berkeley Pit in Montana.
In 2024 the New York Times did a double review of her latest books of fiction, the speculative novel Roxy and Coco and her third story collection that won the Juniper Prize, The Long Swim. Portions of both were written at MacDowell.
Portrait by Beowulf Sheehan
