Survival Is Insufficient: The Millions Interviews Emily St. John Mandel
Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel is, to put it mildly, on a tear. Her critically acclaimed novel Station Eleven (published in 2014) was recently adapted into a limited series by HBO Max, and met with rave reviews by top critics: The New York Times, Roger Ebert, Rolling Stone, and The New Yorker, to name a few. Mandel’s latest novel, Sea of Tranquility, is a work of literary science fiction in which Mandel crafts a tale of flawed and disparate characters—whose lives are unwittingly altered in time and space—yet linked by an anomalous glitch in time.
Mandel was born in 1979 to an American father and a Canadian mother in Comox, British Columbia, Canada. At the age of 10, she moved with her family to the remote Denman Island off the west coast of British Columbia, and was homeschooled for the next five years. At 18, she left high school to attend the School of Toronto Dance Theatre. Mandel now lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.
Her first novel, , was published in 2009, and then in 2010, she released , followed by in 2012. Mandel’s breakout moment came with her fourth novel, , winning the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Toronto Book Award. In addition, was shortlisted for the National Book Award and nominated for both the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Baileys Women’s Prize has been translated into 31 languages—and put Mandel on the map.
