Jenny Offill

Jenny Offill (born 1968) is an American novelist and editor. Her novel Dept. of Speculation was named one of "The 10 Best Books of 2014" by The New York Times Book Review.

Jenny Offill is the only child of two private-school English teachers. She spent her childhood years in various American states, including Massachusetts, California, Indiana, and North Carolina, where she attended high school and received a BA degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and later, at Stanford University, was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction. After graduating, she worked a number of odd jobs: waitress, bartender, caterer, cashier, medical transcriber, fact-checker, and ghostwriter.

Offill's first novel, Last Things, was published in 1999 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and in the UK by Bloomsbury. It was a New York Times Notable book and a finalist for the L. A Times First Book Award. Offill's second novel, Dept. of Speculation, was published in January 2014 and was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review. Dept. of Speculation has been shortlisted for the Folio Prize in the UK, the Pen/Faulkner Award, and the L.A. Times Fiction Award. In 2016 Offill was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Her work has appeared in the Paris Review. She is also the co-editor with Elissa Schappell of two anthologies of essays and the author of several children's books. Offill's short fiction has appeared in Electric Literature and Significant Objects.