Madeline Miller (born July 24, 1978) 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.^[2][3] 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.^[4] 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.^[4]

After completing her degrees, Miller then went on to teach Latin, Greek, and Shakespeare to high school students.^[2][3][5] While working as a teacher, Miller continued work on her novel.^[4]

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.^[6]

She has discussed how Long COVID has affected her life since a February 2020 COVID-19 infection. In an op-ed in The Washington Post in August 2023, she said that having had the disease for three years, she had regained the ability to write but her fatigue had worsened.^[7]

Miller is known for writing mythological realism.^[17] Miller's novels re-imagine stories from Greek mythology, while focusing on themes that she considers timeless, like dysfunctional families and homesickness.^[18][19] She has said that she finds relevance to retelling The Odyssey because it related to "universal human experiences."^[19] In an interview, Miller said that she sees genre as "permeable and changeable"^[20] but said that her books could be characterized as "either literary adaptation or mythological realism. Or just plain old fiction!".^[20] Miller has said though that her approach to the original material was quite different for her two novels. In The Song of Achilles she took an existing story "hidden in the material already" and for Circe she challenged the classic texts by taking out Odysseus voice and replacing it with Circe's,^[21] a more "subversive retelling".^[22]

Miller told a reporter from The Guardian that her inspirations include David Mitchell, Lorrie Moore, Anne Carson, and Virgil.^[23] Miller expressed "hate" and "visceral disgust" towards Ayn Rand's book The Fountainhead. As she herself indicated, she hates the "ideas behind it". Instead, she prefers books by James Herriot and Chinua Achebe.^[24]

• The Song of Achilles. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. ISBN 9781408816035, OCLC 770085076
• Circe: A Novel. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2018. ISBN 9780316556347, OCLC 1029608347^[33][34][35]