Julia Glass

Glass grew up in Massachusetts, studied painting at Yale, and spent years working as a freelance magazine editor and copyeditor in New York while writing fiction on the side largely unpublished, well into her thirties and forties.

Three Junes (2002), her debut novel, unfolds in three sections named for the month in which each occurs across different years: a Scottish widower touring Greece after his wife's death, his gay son navigating a New York bookshop and a dying friend's decline during the AIDS crisis, and the family's converging reckoning back home; it won the National Book Award for Fiction, a rare feat for a first novel.

She has continued writing further novels revisiting some of the same characters, including The Whole World Over, while continuing to paint and live in Massachusetts.