THE SHORT VERSION
Anna Polonyi is the author of the novel TOMORROW WE’LL BE PREY, forthcoming with Ecco/HarperCollins in February 2027. She holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a B.A. in history and literature from Harvard University. Her writing has been supported by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Manchester UNESCO City of Literature and a Fulbright, among others. She lives in Nantes, France, where she writes about forgotten chapters of history and encounters with the non-human natural world.
THE LONG VERSION
(In which I write in the first person like a normal human being). I’m a queer writer and educator, interested in desire, intimacy, legacies and the natural world. TOMORROW WE’LL BE PREY is my first novel and it took me ten years to write.
I first heard about the myth of the Beast of the Gévaudan from a stranger in a carshare ride, and the story stuck with me ever since. With an early draft of the novel, I quit my job in Paris and moved to Iowa to pursue an M.F.A. in fiction with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
I now live in Nantes, France where I teach English and creative writing, and run the Nantes Writers’ Workshop, a week-long workshop for prose writers, with Emily Monaco. I keep the newsletter The Secret Logic, which delivers a mystery list and close reading of a literary excerpt every month to your inbox.
In a previous life, I worked as a news reporter in Berlin and Paris, and my favorite part was having a licence to be curious. I have been lucky to have had brilliant teachers, as an undergraduate at Harvard studying history and literature, at the Paris School of International Affairs/Sciences Po Paris, and at the University of Iowa. I try to pay this forward in my own practice as a teacher.
Gratitude is due to the Fulbright for Young American Journalists, the Richard E. Guthrie Post-Graduate Fellowship, the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts, the Iowa Lakeside Lab, UNESCO Manchester City of Literature, and France’s Centre National du Cinema, among others, for supporting my work.