A blonde, white woman with blue eyes looks into the distance.

Emma Cline

Emma Cline is an American author and writer

Cline is the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author of The Girls, the story collection Daddy and The Guest. The Girls was a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award.

Cline’s stories have been published in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review and The Best American Short Stories. She received the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review and an O’Henry Award, and was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.

Switzy was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026.

Emma Cline on Switzy

‘There is a real strangeness to our lives, with their endings that, for as long as we can, we keep conveniently and necessarily out of sight. David can’t keep his own end out of sight any more – it’s scheduled like any appointment on the calendar.

What would those final few days feel like? Could the impossibility of it all be a little funny, even? You wouldn’t want to start a new TV show – or would you? I wanted to try to drop into a consciousness pressurised by its own ending. And what if that consciousness was already slipping away – what remains of the self? What to make of our lives, all that has passed through us?

I wasn’t really thinking about the book in those terms when I first started – there was just an image of a man in a borrowed plane, flying through the night. But probably it all comes out of my own feelings of mortal terror and loss.’

Read the full interview here.