Madeline Miller is a renowned American novelist, best known for her books The Song of Achilles and Circe. Born on July 24, 1978, in Boston, Massachusetts, Miller grew up in New York City and Philadelphia to classicist parents who instilled in her a fascination with ancient Greek mythology that would later inspire her literary career. In The Book Smugglers blog, she reported that inspiration for her award-winning novels The Song of Achilles and Circe originated at childhood with her mother’s bedtime readings of Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey. 

Miller received her BA and MA in Classics from Brown University, where she studied under Mary Lefkowitz, a renowned scholar of Classics. After completing her studies, she taught high school Latin, Greek, and Shakespearean literature for several years before pursuing a Ph.D. in Classics at Yale University; during this time, she began writing her first novel, The Song of Achilles, a retelling of the myth of Achilles and his companion Patroclus. With directing, teaching, and her studies on her plate, she was left with little time to actually write, and the writing process for her first novel spanned ten years. After years of revising with the help of her now-husband Nathaniel Drake, Miller finally published The Song of Achilles in 2011 to critical acclaim. The novel went on to win the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2012.

Following the success of The Song of Achilles, Miller began working on her second novel, Circe, which was published in 2018. The novel tells the story of main character Circe, goddess of sorcery in Greek mythology, who is banished to a deserted island for using her powers to turn a mortal into a god. Another critical success, Circe was named as one of the best books of 2018 by numerous publications.