Diane Cook

Diane Cook produced radio for This American Life before she published fiction. She trained at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Maine and later earned an MFA at Columbia. Her story collection Man v. Nature reached the shortlists for the Guardian First Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and her stories have run in Harper's, Tin House and Granta and been chosen for Best American Short Stories. A fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts came in 2016. The New Wilderness, her first novel, came out in 2020 and reached the Booker Prize shortlist that year. It is set after pollution has made the City barely liveable, and follows Bea and her daughter Agnes among a small group permitted to live as nomads in the one stretch of land still held back from development.