Patricia Engel

Patricia Engel’s newest book, a short story collection titled The Faraway World, was published in January 2023.

She is also the author of Infinite Country, a New York Times Bestseller, a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year, Reese’s Book Club pick, Esquire Book Club and Book of the Month Club pick, Indie Next pick, Amazon Best Book of the Year, Entertainment Weekly’s #1 Best Book of the Year, named a National Endowment for the Arts Big Read, and more. Infinite Country won the New American Voices Award, a Florida Book Award, was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was long-listed for the Dublin Literary Award and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

Her other books include The Veins of the Ocean, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year; It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris, which won the International Latino Book Award, and Vida, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Fiction Award and the Young Lions Fiction Award; winner of a Florida Book Award, International Latino Book Award and Independent Publisher Book Award, long-listed for the Story Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. For Vida, Patricia was the first woman to be awarded Colombia’s national prize in literature, the 2017 Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana.

She has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, and Key West Literary Seminar among others, and is the recipient of an O. Henry Award.

Patricia’s books have been translated into many languages. Her short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, A Public Space, Ploughshares, The Sun, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, Oprah Daily, and anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, Catapult, and in numerous anthologies.

Born to Colombian parents, Patricia is a graduate of New York University and earned her MFA at Florida International University. She is an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Miami.