Vendela Vida

Vida was born on September 6, 1971, in San Francisco, California.^[3] Both of her parents were European immigrants, her mother was from Sweden and her father is Hungarian.^[4][5] She inherited the name Vendela from her maternal grandmother.^[4]

She left California to attend Middlebury College in Vermont where she received her bachelor's degree in English in 1993. A friend from Middlebury eventually introduced her to her future spouse, Dave Eggers.^[6] She later continued her studies and received a Master of Fine Arts degree at Columbia University.^[4][7] After graduating, she interned at the Paris Review, and adapted her master's degree thesis into her first book, Girls on the Verge.^[4][8]

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.^[9] The Believer happens to be located next door to McSweeney's.^[4]

She is a co-founder and board member of 826 Valencia, a nonprofit organization that teaches creative writing to children and teens.^[4]

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.^[10][11]

In 2017, Vida was a Lurie Author-in-Residence and instructor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University.^[12][13]

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.^[14] In a 2003 Guardian article Vida voiced her plan to author a trilogy of novels "on the subject of violence and rage."^[15]

The second novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (2007, HarperCollins), is a thriller that takes place in the Sápmi region.^[16] 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.^[17]

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.^[18]

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.^[19][13]

She is married to author Dave Eggers, has two children, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.^[10][20][21] Vida and Eggers had met in 1998 in San Francisco at a wedding and started dating in 1999.^[4]

• Vida, Vendela (2000), Girls on the Verge: Debutante Dips, Drive-Bys, and Other Initiations (revised ed.), St. Martin's Press, ISBN 978-0-312-26328-7
• Vida, Vendela (2003), And Now You Can Go (reprint ed.), Paw Prints, ISBN 978-1-4395-7338-9
• Vida, Vendela (2008), Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name: A Novel (reprint ed.), HarperCollins, ISBN 978-0-06-082838-7
• Vida, Vendela (2008), The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers (revised ed.), McSweeney's, ISBN 978-1-932416-94-7
• Eggers, Dave; Vida, Vendela (2009), Away We Go: A Screenplay, Vintage Books, ISBN 978-0-307-47588-6
• Julavits, Heidi; Park, Ed; Vida, Vendela (2009), Read Hard: Five Years of Great Writing from the Believer, McSweeney's, ISBN 978-1-934781-39-5
• Vida, Vendela (2010), The Lovers: A Novel, HarperCollins, ISBN 978-0-06-082839-4
• Vida, Vendela (2015), The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty, Ecco/HarperCollins, ISBN 9780062110916
• Vida, Vendela (2021), We Run the Tides, Ecco/HarperCollins, ISBN 9780062936233^[5]