Maggie Shipstead
Meet Marion Graves and Hadley Baxter: Marion survived a shipwreck as an infant and is determined to be the first person to fly around the world north-south, over the poles. Marian disappears in Antarctica, painfully close to achieving her goal, and is forever surrounded in mystery. A century later, Hadley is a scandal-plagued movie star looking to restart her career by playing the lost pilot. Shipstead’s epic work, Great Circle, masterfully weaves together the stories of two women separated by time and geography but linked by their hunger for self-determination.
Maggie Shipstead is the New York Times best-selling author of three novels—Great Circle, Seating Arrangements, and Astonish Me—and the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Great Circle was a finalist for the 2021 Booker Prize. Her first short story collection, You Have a Friend in 10A, will be published by Knopf in May 2022. Shipstead lives in Los Angeles.
“Soars…thrilling and inevitable…grasps for and ultimately reaches something extraordinary.” — New York Times. “An expansive story that covers more than a century and seems to encapsulate the whole wide world.” — Boston Globe. "A breathtaking epic…a stunning feat." — Publisher's Weekly (starred review).
At the Festival
Maggie Shipstead appears in 2 sessions in the archive.
Maggie Shipstead
Author of Great Circle
Watch the session →2022 Festival: Video and Photos
Featuring New York Times Best Selling Author Maggie Shipstead And 6 Other Award Winning Authors
Books
Copies of every title are available from Vroman's Bookstore at the festival.
Great Circle
Meet Marion Graves and Hadley Baxter: Marion survived a shipwreck as an infant and is determined to be the first person to fly around the world north-south, over the poles. Marian disappears in Antarctica, painfully close to achieving her goal, and is forever surrounded in mystery. A century later, Hadley is a scandal-plagued movie star looking to restart her career by playing the lost pilot. Shipstead’s epic work, Great Circle, masterfully weaves together the stories of two women separated by time and geography but linked by their hunger for self-determination.
Astonish Me
Maggie Shipstead is the author of two novels: Astonish Me, An Amazon Best Book of the Month, and a Huntington Post “Books We’re Talking About,” and Seating Arrangements, a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. She is a graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Her writing has appeared in many publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. In 2012, she was a National Magazine Award finalist for fiction. She lives in Los Angeles.
“Bold and thrilling”— The Boston Globe
“Shipstead rises to the challenge of evoking the excitement of dance, and her descriptions are all the more powerful for emphasizing the hard work behind the grace.”— The New Yorker