Kirsten Bakis

Kirsten Bakis is an American novelist born in Switzerland in 1967 and raised in Westchester County, New York. A graduate of New York University, she published her debut novel, Lives of the Monster Dogs, in 1997 with Farrar, Straus and Giroux; the book, about a colony of genetically and mechanically augmented dogs descended from a nineteenth-century scientific experiment who resettle in New York City, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and has become a cult classic of literary science fiction. Bakis did not publish a second novel for more than two decades, returning in 2024 with King Nyx, a Gothic mystery set on a remote island in the 1920s. Her sparse but distinctive body of work blends literary fiction with speculative and Gothic elements.