Merve Emre

Turkish-American writer Merve Emre was born in Adana, Turkey, and earned a BA from Harvard and a PhD in English Literature from Yale. She has gained acclaim for turning an inquisitive eye on the inner workings of the literary world, like she does in her 2017 book Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, a study on the flourishing of paraliterature and the new ways it can help us think about literature, its audience, and its potential. Emre is also well-known for her essay on the collaboration between the pseudonymous writer Elena Ferrante and the TV station HBO for the adaptation of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels into the limited TV series My Brilliant Friend. Ferrante has never appeared in public and her identity is a well-kept secret, but she agreed to be interviewed by Emre for the essay, resulting in a two-month correspondence where the two women discussed the interaction between books and the identities of their authors. Emre, a mother of two, has taught American Literature at McGill University in Montreal and Oxford University and has been Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at the historic Wesleyan University in Connecticut since 2023. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and her essays and criticism have appeared in many influential publications, such as The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and the London Review of Books.