Cynthia Ozick (born April 17, 1928) is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist.

Ozick was born in New York City. She earned her B.A. from New York University and went on to study English Literature at Ohio State University, where she completed an M.A.

Ozick's fiction and essays are often about Jewish American life, but she also writes on a broad range of topics including politics, history, and literary criticism. Furthermore, she has written and translated poetry.

Her most recent novel, Heir to the Glimmering World (2004), called The Bear Boy in the United Kingdom, received much praise in the literary press. Most recently, Ozick published The Din in the Head, her sixth collection of literary essays.

In 1986, she was selected as the first winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story. Ozick was on the shortlist for the 2005 Man Booker International Prize, and in 2008 she was awarded the PEN/Malamud Award established by Bernard Malamud’s family "to honor excellence in the art of the short story".

Partial list of works

Novels

• Trust (1966)

• The Cannibal Galaxy (1983)

• The Messiah of Stockholm (1987)

• The Puttermesser Papers (1997)

• Heir to the Glimmering World (2004) -- (published in the United Kingdom as The Bear Boy (2005)

Shorter Fiction

• The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971)

• Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976)

• Levitation: Five Fictions (1982)

• Envy; or, Yiddish in America (1989)

• The Shawl (1989)

• Collected Stories (2007)

• Dictation - A Quartet (2008)

Essays

• All the World Wants the Jews Dead (1974)

• Art and Ardor (1983)

• Metaphor & Memory (1989)

• What Henry James Knew and Other Essays on Writers (1993)

• Fame & Folly: Essays (1996)

• Quarrel & Quandary (2000)

• The Din in the Head: Essays (2006)

Drama

• Blue Light (1994)

Miscellaneous

• A Cynthia Ozick Reader (1996)

• The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (introduction 2001)

Reviews

• 2000 NY Times: by John Sutherland (on Ozick's book Quarrel & Quandary)

• 2002 Partisan Review: by Sanford Pinsker

• 2005 The Guardian: by Ali Smith (on Ozick's book The Bear Boy)

• The Din in the Head

• * 2006 Moondance magazine: by Lys Anzia

• * , by Walter Kirn, New York Times Book Review