Quotes by Madeline Miller

Madeline Miller is an American novelist, author of The Song of Achilles (2011) and Circe (2018). Miller spent ten years writing The Song of Achilles while she worked as a teacher of Latin and Greek. The novel tells the story of the love between the mythological figures Achilles and Patroclus; it won the Orange Prize for Fiction, making Miller the fourth debut novelist to win the prize. She is a 2019 recipient of the Alex Awards.
Miller was born on July 24, 1978, in Boston and grew up in New York City and Philadelphia. Miller attended Brown University, completing both a bachelor's and master's degree in Classics (2000 and 2001, respectively). She started writing her first novel, The Song of Achilles, during the final year of her bachelors after co-directing a production of Troilus and Cressida. She has said that the scene in the play that shows Patroclus' death sparked her interest in telling his story and pushed her to start writing. Prior to this moment, she already had a deep interest in Greek mythology and classics. Her mother, a librarian, started reading her The Iliad at five years old and she started learning Latin at 11.
After completing her degrees, Miller then went on to teach Latin, Greek, and Shakespeare to high school students. While working as a teacher, Miller continued work on her novel. She later studied for a year at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought working towards a PhD and from 2009 to 2010 at the Yale School of Drama for an MFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism.