CELESTE NG
Celeste Ng subscribed to Writer’s Digest when she was 12 or 13 years old.
“For someone that was growing up in the suburbs, a teenage girl, it was this whole window into this world that I had never seen before,” she says. “It was so fantastic to go, Oh, there are people who also care about this. And they’re out there. And they’re writing about it, and they’re talking about it, and I can have this window into their lives, too.”
Fitting, then, that almost three decades later and with two New York Times bestsellers under her belt, the 40-year-old novelist is now on the cover of WD’s 100th Anniversary Edition. For a century, this magazine has sought to provide community to scribes of every stripe, to nurture and empower readers like you to achieve their full writing potential—and Ng herself is one sensational example of how perseverance and craft can transform young storytelling aspirations into boundless success.
A graduate of the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program (which has produced such other acclaimed authors as Jesmyn Ward and Jia Tolentino), Ng’s breakout short story “Girls, At Play” won a 2012 Pushcart Prize. Everything I Never Told You, her debut novel about a family in 1970s Ohio grappling with grief, was deemed a “Notable Book of the Year” by The New York Times Book Review and was Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014. Her 2017 follow-up, Little Fires Everywhere, garnered perhaps even more acclaim, as it was named a top read by such diverse outlets as Goodreads, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Buzzfeed, Esquire, and more.
Though she didn’t publish anything new in 2020, this year has been a blockbuster for Ng nonetheless— was adapted into a Hulu series in March starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington (for which Ng served as an executive producer), and in April she was announced as the recipient of a prestigious Guggenheim
