About

Madeleine Watts is a writer of novels, stories, and essays. 

Her debut novel, The Inland Sea, was shortlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. It was published by Pushkin Press (UK/ANZ) in 2020, and in 2021 by Catapult (US). A French translation was published in 2022 by Rue de l’échiquier.

Her second novel, Elegy, Southwest, is forthcoming in February 2025 from Simon & Schuster (North America), Pushkin Press (UK), and Ultimo Press (ANZ). Pre-order it here.

Her writing has been published in Harper’s Magazine, The Believer, The White Review, Literary Hub, The Paris Review Daily, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Irish Times, Guernica, Meanjin and The Lifted Brow, among others. She is the winner of the 2015 Griffith Review Novella Competition. Between 2014 and 2020 she was a bookseller at McNally Jackson in New York City.

She has an MFA in Writing from Columbia University in New York, and graduated from the University of Sydney with a B.A. (Hons I) in English Literature. She has taught at Columbia and Johns Hopkins Universities, the Berlin Writers Workshop, Catapult, and the Center for Fiction.

Madeleine grew up in Sydney, and sometimes Melbourne. After over a decade living in New York, she is now based in Berlin.