Kirsten Bakis (born 1968 Switzerland) is an American novelist. Biography Bakis was raised in Westchester County, New York, and graduated from New York University in 1990. She is a recipient of a Teaching/Writing Fellowship from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, a grant from the Michener/Copernicus Society of America. She published her first novel, Lives of the Monster Dogs, in 1997. In 2017, the novel was reissued. She has taught at Hampshire College and was a writer-in-residence at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York in 2005. She is currently living in Croton-on-Hudson, New York with her husband, their two children, and two dogs, and is at work on her second novel. Critical reception Lives of the Monster Dogs received mostly positive reviews. Critics praised it for its originality, while also noting some of its drawbacks as science fiction. Following the 2017 reissue, Jeff Vandermeer of The Atlantic writes, "20 years later, as it gets a much-deserved reissue, Lives of the Monster Dogs feels undeniably like a classic." Tobias Carroll of Tor.com writes in 2017, "The novel opens with a nearly perfect first line: "In the years since the monster dogs were here with us, in New York, I’ve often been asked to write something about the time I spent with them."" Sharona Lin of Guernica writes in 2020, "It’s a wild and fantastical tale with all the hallmarks of a gothic classic: there’s a mad Prussian scientist, a secretive village, an existential crisis, a pondering of what it truly means to be human." Awards 2004 Whiting Award for fiction New York Times Notable Book for the year, for Lives of the Monster Dogs Orange Prize for Fiction shortlisted, for Lives of the Monster Dogs Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel, for Lives of the Monster Dogs Works Novels Lives of the Monster Dogs, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997 Short ficiton References External links Official website Profile at The Whiting Foundation Living people Swiss emigrants to the United States New York University alumni American women novelists Iowa Writers' Workshop alumni 1967 births 20th-century American novelists 20th-century American women writers 21st-century American women writers