Nina Ellis is a third-year PhD candidate in American Literature at St Edmund's College, University of Cambridge. Her doctoral thesis is a critical biography of the American short story writer Lucia Berlin, funded by a full AHRC Studentship. Nina's agent David Godwin has now sold North American rights to a trade book adaptation of her thesis — entitled Looking for Lucia: A Biography — to Jonathan Galassi at Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Looking for Lucia will be the first biography of the American short story writer Lucia Berlin. Due to be published in 2025, it will draw on a wealth of previously unseen and unpublished material, including letters, manuscripts, notebooks and interviews, and on Nina's AHRC-funded doctoral work. Its biographical chapters will be interspersed with the narrative of Nina’s journey around the United States, Mexico and Chile, searching for Berlin’s many houses, apartments and mobile homes and meeting with her family and friends. Looking for Lucia will create a new form, the ‘biography in motion’, inspired by Berlin’s geographically transient life. It will incorporate passages of travel writing, meditations on movement, and explorations of Nina’s relationship with Berlin as a biographical subject and literary role model.
