Molly Antopol


Molly Antopol is an American fiction and nonfiction writer.

Life and career

Antopol was born in Culver City, California.
She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.
She is the recipient of a Radcliffe Institute fellowship at Harvard University, the Berlin Prize at the American Academy in Berlin and a fellowship from the American Library in Paris.
Her debut story collection The UnAmericans was published in February 2014 by W. W. Norton & Company. It will be published in seven countries.
In 2014, Antopol was nominated for the National Book Award.
Antopol won the 2015 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award for The UnAmericans. She also won a "5 Under 35" award from the National Book Foundation., the French-American Prize, the California Book Award Silver Medal and the Ribalow Prize. The book was also a finalist for the PEN/Robert Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the National Jewish Book Award, the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, the California Book Award, the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award.
In the New York Times, critic Dwight Garner favorably compared Antopol's work to that of Grace Paley and Allegra Goodman, finding the writing "Fresh and offbeat… memorable and promising.” In reviewing The UnAmericans for NPR, author Meg Wolitzer commented that the stories "make you nostalgic, not just for earlier times, but for another era in short fiction. A time when writers such as Bernard Malamud, and Isaac Bashevis Singer and Grace Paley roamed the earth.” In a review in Esquire, critic Benjamin Percy wrote that the book "is poised to be this year’s sensation. The layered riches and historical sweep of its stories make them feel grand, like novels writ small... This collection matters so much."

Awards and honors