Joshua Ferris

The author of the acclaimed debut novel, Then We Came to the End...

Joshua Ferris is the author of the novel Then We Came to the End.The novel is about a group of co-workers in a Chicago ad agency. "More Abandon", the Joshua Ferris story included in the anthology Best New American Voices 2005, sounds very similar, as it involves an office worker who stays in the office after hours, prying into his co-workers' desks. However, what has got all the commentators excited about this novel is that it is written in "the first-person plural", which you might get some sense of from the title. Joshua Ferris was awarded his BA by the University of Iowa in 1996. He then lived in Chicago, which he regards as home. However, he then attended the MFA program at UC Irvine. His first published story, Mrs. Blue, appeared in the Iowa Review in 1999. Then We Came to the End was longlisted for the UK 2007 Guardian First Book Award. He is currently writing his first movie script, Seven Days, which is set to be directed by Mark Waters.

In his own words:

I was born in 1974 in Danville, Illinois, a small town on the Indiana border. I went back recently and the house where I grew up had taken something out of Alice in Wonderland and shrunk to half the size of what I remembered it being. In 1984 my mother, sister, brother and I moved with my step-father to Cudjoe Key, Florida, where I learned how to fish, boat, snorkel, and work. At ten I had my own landscaping company for Cudjoe residents happy to pay three bucks an hour to have their weeds pulled and lawns mowed. I had my first proper job at Godfather's Pizza in 1985, bussing tables and washing dishes. I moved back to Illinois, to Downers Grove, a suburb of Chicago, where I attended high school, after which I went to the University of Iowa, where I received a BA in English and Philosophy. I got my first job in advertising in 1998, at a Chicago firm called Davis Harrison Dion, and also worked for Draft Worldwide, before leaving Chicago for Long Beach, California and the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine.

Fact file

Name: Joshua Ferris

Date of birth: 1974

Place of birth: Danville, Illinois

Current Home: Irvine, California

Education: University of Iowa

Similar Authors: Dave Eggers, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Safran Foer