ABOUT

Anca L. Szilágyi is a Brooklynite living in Chicago. Her writing appears in Lilith Magazine, Orion Magazine, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She is the author of Daughters of the Air, which Shelf Awareness called “a striking debut from a writer to watch.” Dreams Under Glass, her second novel, was called “a novel for our modern times” by Buzzfeed Books.

(Press kit available here.)

Anca L. Szilágyi’s debut novel, Daughters of the Air, released from Lanternfish Press in 2017. The Seattle Review of Books called it “a creation of unearthly talents” and Shelf Awareness called it “a striking debut from a writer to watch.” Dreams Under Glass, her second novel, was described by Newcity as “revelatory” and was called “a novel for our modern times” by Buzzfeed Books.

Her short fiction appears in Lilith Magazine, Gastronomica, Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere and has garnered nominations for a Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net.  In 2015, she was awarded the inaugural Artist Trust / Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award, a $10,000 prize given to one fiction writer in Washington State. She was also awarded an inaugural Made at Hugo House Fellowship to work on her short story collection More Like Home Than Home and, for Dreams Under Glass, she was awarded a grant from 4Culture and a 2015 Jack Straw fellowship. Her nonfiction appears in Orion Magazine, Salon, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Electric Literature, among other publications. The Stranger hailed Anca as “a fantastic magical realist.”

Born in Queens and raised in Brooklyn, Anca studied literature and archaeology at McGill University. She also holds an MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) from Teachers College, Columbia University. She has worked as an ESL instructor and paralegal and has performed modern dance in a former soap factory. In 2011, she earned an MFA from the University of Washington, where she also taught fiction writing, and was awarded the Richard Blessing Scholarship. From 2012-2016 she co-curated The Furnace Reading Series at Hollow Earth Radio with Corinne Manning. She currently lives in Chicago with her husband and son and teaches creative writing online at Atlas Obscura, Hugo House, StoryStudio Chicago, and the Newberry Library. She is at work on a third novel and a collection of lyric essays on food and cultural memory.