Author Jennifer Steil: Go Somewhere That Challenges Your Beliefs

Jennifer Steil is a British-American writer currently living in France. She’s the author of the novel Exile Music, which won Grand Prize in the Eyelands 2020 Book Awards and the Multicultural and Historical International Book Awards. It was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Lesbian Fiction Award. Previous books include the novel The Ambassador’s Wife and the memoir The Woman Who Fell From the Sky. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New Orleans Review, Kenyon Review, World Policy Journal, Mslexia’s Best Women’s Short Fiction 2023, Gay & Lesbian Review, Time, Life, The Washington Times, and Vogue UK. She writes a weekly Substack newsletter called Liminal, about living between cultures, languages, and illness and health. In this interview, she talks with Tanya about her journey from reporting in New York to becoming the editor of a newspaper in Yemen, how being held hostage when she was six months pregnant inspired her first novel, and the seeds of inspiration for her second novel, about Jewish Holocaust refugees in Bolivia.