Celeste Ng


Celeste Ng is an American writer and novelist. She has released many short stories that have been published in a variety of literary journals. Ng's first novel, Everything I Never Told You, released on June 26, 2014, won the Amazon Book of the Year award, as well as praise from critics. Ng's short story Girls at Play won a Pushcart Prize in 2012, and was a 2015 recipient of the Alex Awards. Her most recent novel is Little Fires Everywhere. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020.

Early life and education

Celeste Ng was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her parents moved from Hong Kong in the late 60s. Her father, who died in 2004, was a physicist at NASA in the John H. Glenn Research Center. Her mother was a chemist who taught at Cleveland State University.
When Ng was ten she moved from Pittsburgh to Shaker Heights, Ohio with her parents and sister. She attended the schools in the Shaker Heights City School District, from Woodbury Elementary all the way up to Shaker Heights High School. At Shaker Heights High School, Ng was involved with the student group on race relations for three years and a co-editor of the school's literary magazine, Semanteme. She graduated from high school in 1998.
After graduating from high school, Ng studied English at Harvard University. She then attended graduate school at University of Michigan, where she earned her Master of Fine Arts in writing, now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program. At the University of Michigan, Ng won the Hopwood Award for her short story "What Passes Over".
Ng lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and son. While on a book tour for Everything I Never Told You, Ng said her favorite book when she was little was Harriet the Spy. Her favorite book is now The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.

Career

Ng received the Pushcart Prize in 2012 for her story "Girls, At Play". Her fiction has appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, and Subtropics. Her essays have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, The Millions, and elsewhere. Ng taught writing at the University of Michigan and at Grub Street in Boston. Ng also was an editor of blogs at the website Fiction Writers Review for three years.
Her debut novel, Everything I Never Told You: A Novel, is a literary thriller that focuses on an American family in 1970s Ohio. The novel had four drafts and one revision before completion, which took 6 years. In working on it, Ng said she drew on her own experiences of racism as well as her family and friends. The book, which the Los Angeles Times called an "excellent first novel about family, love, and ambition," won Amazon book of the year in 2014 and was a New York Times Notable Book of 2014. It has been translated into 15 languages.
Ng's second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, is set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and follows two families, one a mother and daughter, that challenge the boundaries in the town. The novel was developed into a 2020 Hulu miniseries of the same name starring and executive produced by Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington; Ng also serves as one of the show's producers.