Evgenia Citkowitz

Evgenia Citkowitz (born Eugenia Citkowitz; 1964) is a British-American playwright, author and journalist.

Early life and family Eugenia Citkowitz was born in 1964 in the state of New York, the youngest of two daughters to Israel Citkowitz, an American pianist, composer and piano teacher, and Lady Caroline Blackwood, an English writer. Citkowitz grew up in London; Citkowitz has four half-siblings. Her stepfather was Robert Lowell, an American poet.

Citkowitz attended a boarding school in Devon. During her teenage years, she attended St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith. Citkowitz graduated with a degree in English literature from Oxford University. She was educated, briefly, in the United States. Citkowitz is an heiress to the Guinness beer fortune. Her uncle and aunt were the 5th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, an Anglo-Irish noble, and Lindy, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, an English conservationist, and Citkowitz's fifth cousin.

Career Citkowitz's first book Ether was published in 2010, a collection of seven short stories and a novella. Ether was picked as The New York Times Editors' Choice and included in The New Yorker'''s Book Club. Citkowitz stated that the purpose of the novel was to look into the "fragility of human existence" and the original story grew from the idea of "someone returning to their childhood home" that she then expanded upon. One of her primary focuses was to create characters that felt "authentic as people" in order to form empathy in the reader and also why she researched the intricacies of the fields and hobbies each of the characters practice in the novel, such as pottery.

Citkowitz has written for various publications in the United Kingdom and the United States, including The Sunday Times, The London Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times and Harper's Bazaar.

Published works

Source: Citkowitz, Evgenia (2010). Ether. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. . Citkowitz, Evgenia (2018). The Shades''. W. W. Norton & Company. .

Accolades Citkowitz has previously been longlisted for The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, and was one of the winners of The Word Factory's Neil Gaiman, Fables for a Modern World story competition.

Personal life Citkowitz keeps her personal life mostly private. after being introduced to him by John Malkovich. Sands disappeared in January 2023 during a hiking trip, and his remains were found in June 2023. The couple had two daughters, and Citkowitz is stepmother to a son from Sands' first marriage.