Lily Tuck

Tuck was born in Paris to a Franco-American family and spent much of her childhood in Uruguay, Peru, and other parts of Latin America before her family settled in the United States, an itinerant, multilingual upbringing that later shaped her fiction's fragmented, international scope.

The News from Paraguay (2004) reconstructs, through short accumulating vignettes rather than continuous narrative, the real Irish-born courtesan Eliza Lynch's rise alongside Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López, whose vanity and ambition drove the country into the catastrophic War of the Triple Alliance, one of the deadliest conflicts in the Americas; it won the National Book Award.

She has continued writing spare, elliptical novels, including Siam and I Married You for Happiness, often built from similarly fractured, present-tense scenes, while teaching creative writing at several American universities.