about Ruth

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. Bringing together issues of science, religion, environmental politics, and global pop culture, her books have been celebrated for their range and formal invention.

Her new book and first collection of short stories, The Typing Lady and Other Fictions, will be published by Viking in June 2026. The eleven stories explore childhood ambition, youthful desire, midlife reinvention, and the unsparing clarity of old age. Threaded through with the tactile ephemera of writing — typewriters, letters, manuscripts, and disappearing ink — the book celebrates the power of language and storytelling to cope with loss.

Her novels — My Year of Meats (1998), All Over Creation (2003), A Tale for the Time Being (2013), and The Book of Form and Emptiness (2022) — have been translated and published in over thirty countries. Her third novel, A Tale for the Time Being, won the LA Times Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Book of Form and Emptiness is the winner of the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction as well as the 22nd Annual Massachusetts Book Award, the BC Yukon Book Prize, and the Julia Ward Howe Prize for Fiction.

Her non-fiction work includes a memoir, The Face: A Time Code (2016), published by Restless Books, and the documentary film Halving the Bones, currently screening on the Criterion Channel. Her films have also been shown on PBS, at the Sundance Film Festival, and at colleges and universities across the country.

A longtime Buddhist practitioner, Ruth was ordained by Zoketsu Norman Fischer and is affiliated with the Everyday Zen Foundation.

She is Professor Emerita of English Language & Literature at Smith College, where she was the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities. A dual citizen of Canada and the United States, she divides her time between Western Massachusetts, New York City, and British Columbia, Canada.