Nell Zink

Biography

Born in California, Zink was raised in rural Virginia, a setting she draws on in her novel Mislaid (Ecco, 2015). She attended Stuart Hall School and the College of William and Mary, where she earned a B.A. in Philosophy. In 1993, while living in West Philadelphia, Zink founded a zine called Animal Review, which ran until 1997 and "featured submissions and interviews with punk musicians about their pets, from King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp writing about his rabbit Beaton Bunnerius Bun, to Jon Langford, of British punk band The Mekons, discussing his loach fish." Zink has worked as a secretary at Colgate-Palmolive, and as a technical writer in Tel Aviv. Zink moved to Germany in May 2000, eventually earning a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Tübingen. She worked as a contributor for the daily newspaper in Tübingen, Schwäbisches Tagblatt, and later as a translator for Zeitenspiegel agency.

Writing career

After fifteen years spent writing fiction exclusively for a single pen pal, the Israeli postmodernist Avner Shats, Zink caught the attention of Jonathan Franzen with a "brazen" letter promoting the work of the German ornithologist Martin Schneider-Jacoby. The two writers began a correspondence, and Franzen was surprised to learn that Zink had no published literary work. Zink began to create work for Franzen:

I was so tired of Franzen saying that I should take myself seriously as a writer and I wanted to make very clear that there's a very clear distinction between taking your career seriously and taking your writing seriously. So I wrote the first part of a new novel, called The Wallcreeper, in just four days to show him that I knew what I was doing as a writer.

In early 2012, Zink sent Franzen her collected manuscripts. Franzen tried unsuccessfully to interest publishers in her 1998 novel Sailing Towards the Sunset by Avner Shats (sic). It was Franzen's agent who finally negotiated a six-figure publishing deal for Zink's Mislaid. Meanwhile, The Wallcreeper, "about a bird-loving American couple that moves to Europe and becomes, basically, eco-terrorists" (Keith Gessen), was published independently in the United States in 2014. New York Times reviewer Robin Romm wrote "Zink's work may be, at times, cerebral and a little distancing, but its vitality and purpose are invigorating." Kirkus Reviews called it "a brief yet masterful novel of epic breadth."

Zink's second novel, Mislaid (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2015), her first under a major publisher, follows the story of a white lesbian, Peggy, later 'Meg', born in rural Virginia in the 1960s. Peggy leaves her marriage to her gay professor, and with the help of a stolen birth certificate, creates a new African-American identity for herself and her daughter, Mireille/Karen. Accounting for this unusual 'passing', Peggy/Meg explains:

“Virginia was settled before slavery began, and it was diverse. There were tawny black people with hazel eyes. Black people with auburn hair, skin like butter and eyes of deep blue green. Blond, blue-eyed black people resembling a recent chairman of the N.A.A.C.P. The only way to tell white from colored for purposes of segregation was the one-drop rule: If one of your ancestors was black — ever in the history of the world, all the way back to Noah’s son Ham — so were you.”

Though Dwight Garner called the book “a minor and misshapen novel from a potentially major voice,” Walter Kirn, in the New York Times Book Review, found it a "provocative masquerade with heart," identifying an "elegance and confidence that are exceptionally rare now." Times Magazine writer Daniel J. Sharfstein has observed that while Zink's plot may be "over-the-top," the real-life case of former NAACP chapter president Rachel Dolezal bears a remarkable parallel.

Personal life

Zink lives in Bad Belzig, Germany. Zink worked in construction, waited tables, and was a secretary before working as a translator. "There's never a market for true art," Zink told an interviewer, "so my main concern was always to have a job that didn’t require me to write or think."

Zink has been married twice. On May 8, 1990, she married Benjamin Alexander Burck in a "very simple civil ceremony" at the Henrico County Courthouse in Richmond, Virginia. She later married the Israeli composer and poet Zohar Eitan.