Maile Meloy

Who is Maile Meloy?

Maile Meloy is an American fiction writer. Born and raised in Helena, Montana, Meloy received a bachelor's degree Harvard College in 1994 and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine.

Meloy won The Paris Review 's Aga Khan Prize for Fiction for her story, "Aqua Boulevard," in 2001; the PEN/Malamud Award for her first collection of short stories, Half in Love, in 2003; and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004. In 2007, Granta included her on its list of the 21 "Best Young American Novelists."

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, and she is a frequent contributor to The New York Times.

Describing how she wrote "Half in Love," Meloy is quoted on the Ploughshares web site as saying, "What I wound up with was a book that was set in different decades, partly in Montana—and those stories were some of the hardest to write, because it's the place I’m closest to—and partly in other places, in London and Paris and Greece. So it had very little temporal or geographical unity, but the characters are all caught between one thing and another, half in love with something or someone, when life deals them something they didn’t expect."

Meloy is the older sister of Colin Meloy, frontman of The Decemberists, solo artist, and the writer of Wildwood and Under Wildwood. She lives in Los Angeles.