ELIZABETH GAFFNEY


Elizabeth Gaffney Elizabeth Gaffney is a native Brooklynite.

Her first novel, Metropolis, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, was published by Random House in 2005. Her second novel, When the World Was Young, was published by Random House in 2014. She won the 2019 Lawrence Prize for Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in many literary magazines, and she has translated four books from German. She also runs The 24-Hour Room, a free virtual writers space.

Gaffney graduated with honors from Vassar College and holds an M.F.A. in fiction from Brooklyn College; she also studied philosophy and German at Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich. She has been a resident artist at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony and the Blue Mountain Center. She also teaches fiction and serves as the editor at large of the literary magazine A Public Space.

She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the neurologist Alex Boro, and their two daughters.