Elizabeth McCracken is the award-winning author of eight books including The Giant's House (a National Book Award finalist), Thunderstruck & Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award), and The Hero of This Book (winner of the Wingate Prize). She has received grants and fellow­ships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and she was chosen as one of Granta's twenty best American writers under forty. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and taught at the University of Texas at Austin.