Canadian · b. 1997
Emily Austin is a Canadian novelist who lives in Ontario. Her debut novel, We Are All Perfectly Fine Here, was followed by Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead (2021), a story about an anxious, queer, atheist narrator who takes a job as a receptionist at a Catholic church. The book was widely read and translated, and it brought her a large readership. She followed it with Interesting Facts About Space (2023) and Gay Girl, Good God. Her novels feature anxious, funny first-person narrators who deal with death, faith, mental illness and queer identity. She also writes poetry. Austin writes in a plain, direct style that mixes dark humor with sincere feeling, and her work is often placed among recent queer literary fiction about mental health.