Vendela Vida | |
|---|---|
 Vida in 2010 | |
| Born | September 6, 1971 San Francisco, California, U.S. |
| Education | Middlebury College Columbia University (MFA) |
| Occupation(s) | Novelist, journalist, editor, screenplay writer, educator |
| Spouse | Dave Eggers |
| Children | 2 |
| Website | www |
Vendela Vida (born September 6, 1971)[1] is an American novelist, journalist, editor, screenplay writer, and educator. She is the author of multiple books, has worked as a writing teacher, and is a founder and editor of The Believer magazine.[2]
Vida was born on September 6, 1971, in San Francisco, California. Both of her parents were European immigrants, her mother was from Sweden and her father is Hungarian.[3][4] She inherited the name Vendela from her maternal grandmother.[3]
She left California to get her bachelor's degree in English in 1993 at Middlebury College in Vermont, and it was through a mutual friend from her undergraduate degree that she met her future spouse, Dave Eggers.[5] She later continued her studies and received a Master of Fine Arts degree at Columbia University.[3][6] After graduating, she interned at the Paris Review, and she adapted her master's degree thesis into her first book, Girls on the Verge.[3][7]
In 2003, Vida co-founded The Believer magazine with Dave Eggers and works as an editor with her friends from grad school Heidi Julavits and Ed Park.[8] The Believer happens to be located next door to McSweeney's.[3]
She is a co-founder and board member of 826 Valencia, a nonprofit organization that teaches creative writing to children and teens.[3]
Vida collaborated with Dave Eggers on the screenplay for the 2009 film Away We Go, directed by Sam Mendes and co-starring John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph.[9][10]
In 2017, Vida was a Lurie Author-in-Residence and instructor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University.[11][12]
Published in 2003, And Now You Can Go is a novel set in New York City, San Francisco, and the Philippines, tracing the impulsive journeys of a young woman in the wake of an assault.[13] In a 2003 Guardian article Vida voiced her plan to author a trilogy of novels "on the subject of violence and rage."[14]
The second novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (2007, HarperCollins), is a thriller that takes place in the Sápmi region.[15] As a 2013 fellow at the Sundance Labs, Vida alongside Eva Weber developed Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name into a script, which received the Sundance Institute Mahindra Global Filmmaking Award.[16]
The Lovers (June 2010, Ecco), author Joyce Carol Oates called it "a riveting and suspenseful novel about an American woman’s voyage to self-discovery.”[citation needed] The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty (2015, Ecco/HarperCollins), was inspired by a trip Vida took to Morocco where her bag was stolen.[17]
Two of Vida’s novels have been New York Times notable books of the year, and she is the winner of the 2007 Kate Chopin Award, given to a writer whose female protagonist chooses an unconventional path.[18][12]
She is married to author Dave Eggers, has two children, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.[9][19][20] Vida and Eggers had met in 1998 in San Francisco at a wedding and started dating in 1999.[3]
