From 'Pictures' To 'Murals'

“I grew up writing. It was very natural in my household. My father was a poet, and his mother had been a novelist back in Hungary. I don't think I really thought about it being my career until high school, which is still pretty early, but it was a while there of just assuming this was something everyone did all day long.” – Rebecca Makkai

Born in Illinois on this date in 1978, Makkai not only lived up to what was expected but excelled at it as well.  Her novel about the 1980s AIDS epidemic, The Great Believers, won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.

Those accolades came on the heels of a basketful of awards for her novel The Hundred-Year House, winner of the 2015 Novel of the Year award from the Chicago Writers Association. 

Also an exemplary short story writer and essayist her fiction has appeared in such magazines as Ploughshares, New England Review and Shenandoah.  Her nonfiction has been in places like Harpers and the New Yorker website. Makkai's stories also have been featured on Public Radio International’s Selected Shorts and This American Life.    The winner of the prestigious Pushcart Prize, she said she enjoys both fictional genres in which she writes.

“Writing a short story is like painting a picture on the head of a pin. And just getting everything to fit is - sometimes seems impossible,” she said.  “Writing a novel, though, is - has its own challenges of scope. And I think of that as painting a mural, where the challenge is that if you are close enough to work on it, you're too close to see the whole thing.”

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