Emily St. John Mandel

Biography

Emily St. John Mandel was born in 1979 in British Columbia, Canada, and grew up on Denman Island — the model for Arthur's isolated Delano Island. She moved to Toronto, then New York, working in administrative and corporate jobs while writing fiction at night, publishing three crime novels before Station Eleven. She began writing Station Eleven without having read much post-apocalyptic fiction — she wanted to write about what comes after rather than the catastrophe itself. The novel was published to immediate critical acclaim, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Its television adaptation aired in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, which transformed the book's cultural resonance.

Emily St. John Mandel at a glance