Daphne Kalotay grew up in New Jersey, where her parents had relocated from Ontario; her mother is Canadian, while her father came from Hungary to Canada as a teen. Daphne attended Vassar College, majoring in psychology, before moving to Boston to attend Boston University's graduate program in fiction writing. She stayed on at BU to study with Saul Bellow as part of the University Professors program, where she earned a PhD in Modern and Contemporary literature, writing her dissertation on one of her favorite writers, Mavis Gallant. Her interview with Mavis Gallant can be found in the Paris Review's Writers-at-work series. At Boston University, Daphne's stories won the school's Florence Engell Randall Fiction Prize and a Henfield Foundation Award. Her first book, the fiction collection Calamity and Other Stories, includes work first published in Agni, Good Housekeeping, The Literary Review, Missouri Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Prairie Schooner, and was short-listed for the Story Prize. Her debut novel, Russian Winter, has been published in over 20 languages and won the 2011 Writers' League of Texas Award in Fiction. Her second novel, Sight Reading, won the New England Society Book Award in Fiction. Daphne has taught literature and creative writing at Boston University, University of Massachusetts, Harvard University, Skidmore College, Middlebury College, and Princeton University. She lives in the Boston area.