A writer of stillness.

Elena was born in Lisbon in 1978 and moved with her mother to Northern California at the age of nine. She grew up bilingual and slightly out of place — a condition, she has often said, that made her a reader before it made her a writer.

She studied comparative literature at Berkeley and completed an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where her thesis became her debut novel, The Weight of Salt. It won the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and marked the beginning of a body of work now translated into twenty-seven languages.

Elena has taught fiction at Stanford, Sarah Lawrence, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, A Public Space, and The Paris Review.

She lives in a small house north of San Francisco with her partner, two children, and a stubborn rescue dog named Ferrante. She is at work on her fifth novel.