Jayne Anne Phillips

Phillips was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia, and studied at West Virginia University and the University of Iowa; her early story collection Black Tickets established her, still in her twenties, as a major new voice of American fiction's return to closely observed regional realism.

Night Watch (2023) moves between a mother and daughter fleeing Civil War-era violence in the mountains of West Virginia and a shell-shocked, wandering Union veteran who arrives, unrecognized, at the same lunatic asylum where the daughter now works as an attendant, its fractured chronology slowly revealing how the three lives are bound together; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2024.

Her earlier novels, including Machine Dreams and Lark and Termite, established a career-long fascination with American war's long domestic aftermath, and Night Watch, published nearly a decade after her previous novel, confirmed her patient, elliptical method at its most fully realized.