Sarah Rose Etter is an American author of fiction. She is best known for her debut novel, The Book of X, winner of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Award. Her short fiction collection, Tongue Party, was selected by Deb Olin Unferth to be published as the winner of the 2011 Caketrain Award.
Sarah Rose Etter earned her B.A. in English from Pennsylvania State University and her M.F.A. in Fiction from Rosemont College.
Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in TIME, Guernica, BOMB, Gulf Coast, The Cut, VICE, and more.
She has been awarded residencies at the Jack Kerouac House, the Disquiet International program in Portugal, and the Gullkistan Writing Residency in Iceland.
Her short story collection, Tongue Party, was selected by writer and judge Deb Olin Unferth as the winner of the 2010 Caketrain Chapbook Competition.
In 2017, she was the keynote speaker at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers conference in Bordeaux, France, where she presented surrealist writing as a mode of feminism.
Sarah Rose Etter debuted with The Book of X. The novel is about Cassie, a girl born with her stomach in a knot — literally. Some critics have admitted that the work is difficult to categorize. It shares commonalities with absurdism, the new weird, and feminist coming-of-age novels.
"Due in part to my love of visual art, I wanted to create a book that felt like a movie, full of heart and horror and visuals and facts," the novelist says.
Her most recent work is RIPE (2023). The novel offers a sharp yet vulnerable perspective on one woman's journey through the complexities of modern life in a late-capitalist community, blending unsettling themes with dark humor.
Sarah Rose Etter lives in Los Angeles, CA.
Photo credit: Lee Jameson