Sabina Murray writes fiction about war, empire, and the violence that hides inside civilization, often with the Philippines somewhere in the frame. Her short-story collection The Caprices (2002), set across the Pacific theater of the Second World War, won the 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, one of the most prestigious in American letters; its stories move from prison camps to occupied villages and refuse easy heroism.

She grew up between worlds. Born in 1968 and raised partly in the Philippines and partly in Australia, in a prominent Manila family, she studied at Mount Holyoke and the University of Texas, and has since become a fixture of American literary fiction. She is a professor and directs the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and she has written for film, with an Independent Spirit Award nomination for the screenplay of The Beautiful Country.

Her novels range widely while circling the same concerns. A Carnivore's Inquiry follows an unreliable young woman across America, Forgery moves among antiquities dealers in 1960s Greece, and Valiant Gentlemen (2016), named a notable book of the year by The New York Times and The Washington Post, reimagines the friendship between the humanitarian Roger Casement and the sculptor Herbert Ward against the violence of empire in the Congo and beyond.

She has returned more directly to the Philippines in recent work. The Human Zoo (2021) is narrated by Ting Klein, a Filipino-American writer back in Manila amid the upheavals of contemporary Philippine politics, and takes its title from the colonial exhibitions that once put Filipinos on display, a history Murray refuses to let stay buried. Her 2023 collection Muckross Abbey turns to a wry, modern gothic.

Across the books she keeps asking how ordinary people live inside history's catastrophes. Her recurring subjects are war and its aftermath, colonialism and the Philippine and Pacific past, and the thin membrane between violence and civilization, handled in cool, exact prose. A Guggenheim fellow and a longtime teacher of younger writers, Murray is, for a list of living Filipino authors, among the most awarded in American literary fiction, and one of the few to carry the Pacific war and the Philippine past to a wide American readership.

Selected and fact-checked against Hardcover and Open Library.