Lily Tuck

Lily Tuck is an American novelist, short story writer and biographer. Born in Paris, she moved often as a child as her family relocated across Europe and South America, and she later lived in Thailand in the early 1960s. She studied at Radcliffe College and at the Sorbonne.

Her novels include Interviewing Matisse, or The Woman Who Died Standing Up (1991), The Woman Who Walked on Water (1997) and Siam, or The Woman Who Shot a Man (1999), which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. The News from Paraguay (2004), a historical novel about an Irish courtesan and the future dictator of Paraguay, won the 2004 National Book Award for Fiction. Later books include I Married You for Happiness, Sisters and The Double Life of Liliane, and she has also written a biography of the Italian novelist Elsa Morante.

Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, and she has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in New York.