Mona Simpson was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 1957. Her father was a professor of political science and her mother a speech therapist. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia. She has published four novels, Anywhere But Here (1986), The Lost Father (1992), A Regular Guy (1996) and Off Keck Road (2000), which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award. In 1996 she was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, and she is a winner of the Whiting Prize and the Lila Wallace award. Her latest novel is Casebook (2014).