Nina Ellis

Source: https://www.aucegypt.edu/fac/nina-ellis Parent: https://www.aucegypt.edu/academics

Nina Ellis

• Position: Assistant Professor, English and Comparative Literature
• Department: Department of English and Comparative Literature
• Email: nina.ellis@aucegypt.edu

Brief Biography

Nina Ellis is an author of fiction and nonfiction and an assistant professor of English and comparative literature at The American University in Cairo (AUC). She holds a PhD in American literature from the University of Cambridge, an MA in English and American literature from University College London (UCL) and an MA Cantab in archaeology and anthropology from the University of Cambridge. She also holds PGCE and QTS degrees from UCL’s Institute of Education.

Before joining AUC, Ellis taught creative writing (prose fiction and nonfiction) and English literature at the University of Cambridge. She has been a guest lecturer in the Creative Writing Program at UCL East and has presented her research at a wide variety of conferences and symposia, including the Women Writing Women’s Lives Seminar at The City University of New York, the Biographers International Organization Annual Conference and the European Network for Short Fiction Researchers Annual Conference. She won a Work-in-Progress Award from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation in 2024 and she was the Biographers International Organization’s Chip Bishop Fellow in 2023. Before returning to academia, Ellis taught secondary school in East London and worked as a junior literary agent at the Wylie Agency in New York.

Ellis has published numerous academic and non-academic articles and essays, as well as many short stories, one of which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2024 and another of which won an Editors’ Choice Award in the 2021 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. She is the first biographer of the North American writer Lucia Berlin. Ellis’s book, Looking for Lucia: A Biography in Motion, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2026 or 2027.

Research Interest

• Comparative literature
• World literature
• American literature
• Contemporary literature
• Twentieth-century literature
• Creative writing craft and practice
• Literary history
• Literary theory
• The short story
• Biography and life writing
• The National Endowment for the Arts
• The literary “American counterculture”
• Lucia Berlin

Education

• PhD, University of Cambridge (2024)
• MA, University College London (2018)
• PGCE and QTS, UCL Institute of Education (2016)
• MA Cantab, University of Cambridge (2011)

Publications

• Looking for Lucia: A Biography in Motionwill be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2026 or 2027. It is the first book on the North American short story writer Lucia Berlin, lying at the crossroads of biography, travel writing and literary criticism.
• Peer-reviewed articles include (amongst others): ‘The Borders of Biography: Lucia Berlin and Me’, in Cambridge Quarterly (2024); ‘“So What, I’m on the Roof”: Lucia Berlin’s Roots in Spanish and Chilean Literatures’, in Short Fiction in Theory & Practice(2024); and ‘The Short Autofictions of Eve Babitz, Lucia Berlin and Bette Howland’, in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction(2022).
• Essays and articles include (amongst others): ‘On Growing up with “America”’, in Critical Quarterly(2025); ‘Stationery in Motion: Letters from Hotels’, in The Paris Review(2023); ‘Watching America from Islamabad’, in the Oxford Review of Books(2021); and ‘Lucia Berlin Writes Home’, in Granta(2018).
• Short stories include (amongst others): ‘New Territories’ in J Journal(2025); ‘Georgia O’Keeffe and the Angel of Death’in The Idaho Review(2023); ‘The Kingdom of the Shades’ in Carve Magazine (2021); and ‘Our Agent at Dawn’ in Granta(2019).