Catherine Lacey (born April 9, 1985) is an American writer. She is the author of the award winning novels Biography of X and Pew. She is the recipient of a 2016 Whiting Award and 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction.
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Early life and education
Lacey was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1985. She received her undergraduate degree from Loyola University New Orleans, where she majored in visual arts and writing. She earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University in 2010.
Career
Lacey was a founding member of 3B, a cooperatively owned and operated bed and breakfast in downtown Brooklyn, where she lived while she wrote her first novel. In 2012, Lacey won an Artists' Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts that she credits for giving her the financial freedom to finish Nobody Is Ever Missing.
Nobody Is Ever Missing was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In The New York Times, Dwight Garner called Lacey's prose "dreamy and fierce at the same time." Time Out named it "the (hands down) best book of the year." It also made The New Yorker's list of the best books of 2014. It has been translated into Dutch, Spanish, Italian, French, and German. The novel was a finalist for the New York Public Library's 2015 Young Lions Fiction Award.
In 2017, Lacey was named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists. Her second novel, The Answers (2017), was also published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It received several favorable reviews and comparisons to Don DeLillo and Margaret Atwood. In an interview with Vogue, Lacey said: "Even the person who wrote Nobody Is Ever Missing, I can't really speak on her behalf anymore. The text is kind of what's left of that person, and that person doesn't exist anymore. It both makes me very uncomfortable and very relaxed, because who you are and what you think that you're attached to vanishes very quickly."
Lacey's 2020 novel Pew was shortlisted for the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize and won the New York Public Library's 2021 Young Lions Fiction Award.
Lacey's fourth novel, Biography of X, a fictional biography and alternative history, was published in 2023. The New Statesman said the book "thrillingly subverts the conventions of life-writing." Time named it one of "the 100 must-read books of 2023." The novel was shortlisted for the 2024 Dylan Thomas Prize. It won the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction.
Lacey's nonfiction/fiction hybrid work The Möbius Book was released in June 2025. The Möbius Book was a finalist for the 2026 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction.
Lacey's short-story collection My Stalkers is set for release in January 2027.
Personal life
In August 2015, Lacey married actor and teacher Peter Musante; they divorced the next year. Lacey was partnered with writer Jesse Ball from 2016 to 2021. As of 2024, she is married to the writer Daniel Saldaña París. The couple live in Mexico City.
Lacey has taught in the writing program at Columbia University's School of the Arts.