Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellows in Fiction

Molly Antopol

Class of Spring 2017

Writer; and Jones Lecturer of Creative Writing

Stanford University

California

The After Party: A Novel

At the Academy, Antopol will continue research and work on her novel-in-progress, “The After Party.” The novel explores Antopol’s interest in history and politics, privacy, and the Cold War. The book, writes Antopol, “Is about a marriage between two people swept up by the forces of history and the destructive power of ambition. Years under surveillance, it turns out, have taught my characters how to live in secret – even from one another.”

Molly Antopol is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where she now teaches writing as Jones Lecturer in Fiction. She is the 2013 recipient of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” award to promising young writers, and she spent the 2015-2016 year as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard University. Her writing has appeared on NPR’s “This American Life” and in many magazines and journals, and won a 2015 O. Henry Prize. Antopol holds an MFA from Columbia University and BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Her debut collection, The UnAmericans (W.W. Norton, 2014) is a collection of diverse stories, set in the US, Europe, and Israel. Published in seven countries, it was nominated for the National Book Award and won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. It was a finalist for many prizes, including the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, California Book Award, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award.