Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1960. He graduated magna cum laude from Brown University and received an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University in 1986. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published to acclaim in 1993. It has been translated into 34 languages and made into a feature film. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Best American Short Stories, The Gettysburg Review, and Granta's "Best of Young American Novelists."

Eugenides is the recipient of many awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a Whiting Writers' Award, and the Henry D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In the past few years he has been a Fellow of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm of the DAAD and of the American Academy in Berlin. After several years in Berlin, Eugenides now lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with his wife and daughter.

In addition to winning the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Middlesex was awarded the Ambassador Book Award, Spain's Santiago de Compostela Literary Prize, and the Great Lakes Book Award. Middlesex was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Frances's Prix Medicis and the IMPAC Dublin Literature Prize.

Eugenides opens up about the inspiration behind Middlesex.

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