Jenefer Shute is the author of the novels Life-Size, Sex Crimes, Free Fall, and User ID, as well as numerous essays and articles in publications such as Harpers, the Nation, salon.com, The Guardian, Tikkun, the Boston Review, and Modern Fiction Studies.

Life-Size, the story of a young woman who refuses to eat, was named one of the “Top Twenty” titles at London’s Feminist Book Festival in 1993, and has been extensively anthologized. Sex Crimes, the story of a sexual obsession that escalates into violence, has been optioned for a feature film, as has User ID, a novel about identity theft. Shute’s fiction has been translated into nine languages.

Recent shorter pieces include “Instructions for Surviving the Unprecedented,” which appears in 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, and “The Annotated Guide,” in A City Imagined: Cape Town and the Meanings of a Place, edited by Stephen Watson.

Shute is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. She has also received residency awards from the Fondazione Bogliasco (Italy), the Tyrone Guthrie Center (Ireland), the Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation (Switzerland), the Julia and David White Artists’ Colony (Costa Rica), and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program (USA).

Her critical essays on Nabokov appear in, among others, The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, and Lolita: A Casebook, from Oxford University Press.

Jenefer Shute has a PhD in literature from the University of California and was, until recently, a professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York, where she taught in the MFA program in creative writing. She has also taught courses in contemporary literature, film, and digital media at institutions around the world – most recently, the University of Cape Town and the University of Paris.

From 2012-2016, Shute worked as a fiction editor in Cape Town, South Africa. She is currently an editor at Esri Press.