Matt Ruff

Matthew Theron Ruff (born September 8, 1965) is an American author of thriller, science fiction and comic novels, including The Mirage and Lovecraft Country, the latter having been adapted in 2020 by HBO into a TV series. Early life and education Ruff was born in Brooklyn, New York City, in 1965, to a Lutheran family of German ancestry. His father was a hospital chaplain, and his maternal grandfather was a missionary. At the age of 5, he decided he wanted to be a fiction writer. He spent his childhood and adolescence learning how to tell stories. In elementary school, he wrote a number of short stories, many of them starring his classmates in scenarios cribbed from movies or TV. Ruff has said that reading these aloud in English class was his first experience performing in front of an audience and his first solid evidence that he had what it took to entertain people with his storytelling.