Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon is an American novelist whose debut, The Word Exchange (2014, Doubleday), imagines a near-future crisis triggered by a virus spreading through digital dictionaries and language-decoding devices. She spent six years writing the novel, continually updating its technology to keep pace with real-world innovation, from autonomous cars to early wearable computing. Graedon has said the book grew partly from losing her personal library in an apartment fire during college, an experience that left her thinking about the fragility of words and language. The novel was translated into eight languages and widely praised for its ambitious take on technology's intrusion into daily life.