Madeline Miller

1 universe Last reviewed 2026-08-13

Madeline Miller is an American novelist born July 24, 1978, in Boston, who grew up between New York City and Philadelphia and developed a passion for Greek mythology after her librarian mother read her the Iliad at age five. She earned bachelor's and master's degrees in classics from Brown University and worked as a high school Latin, Greek, and Shakespeare teacher, and later studied at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought and completed an MFA in dramaturgy at Yale School of Drama in 2010. She spent ten years writing her debut novel, The Song of Achilles (2011), about the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2012, and later wrote Circe (2018), a retelling centered on the Greek enchantress, which won a widely recognized reader-voted award in 2018, the Kitschies Red Tentacle Award, and an Indies Choice Book Award in 2019. She followed with the short novel Galatea (2022), a retelling of the Pygmalion myth, and has discussed publicly battling long COVID since February 2020. An HBO Max miniseries adaptation of Circe is in development.

Universe(s)

Books

• The Song of Achilles (2011) · The Song of Achilles and Circe Core Canon
• Circe (2018) · The Song of Achilles and Circe Core Canon

Aggregate across all universes

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 2 books
• Award recognitions across all universes: 5 (3 won, 1 finalist mention, 1 nomination)

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