Nellie Hermann grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her first novel, The Cure for Grief, published in 2008 by Scribner, received acclaim in Time magazine, Elle, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and others, and was chosen as a Target "Breakout" book. Her non-fiction has appeared in an anthology about siblings, Freud's Blindspot (Free Press: 2010), as well as in Academic Medicine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, LA Times, The Believer, and New York Review of Books.

Nellie received her MFA from Columbia University and is now Lecturer in Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia’s Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons and the Creative Director of Columbia Narrative Medicine. She has taught creative writing to undergraduates, medical students, graduate students, and clinicians of all sorts and has given numerous national and international conference addresses. She has two chapters in The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2016). She has received distinguished residency invitations from The Millay Colony, The UCross Foundation, The Saltonstall Foundation of the Arts, and others. Her second novel, The Season of Migration, was published in January 2015 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and out in paperback with Picador in July, 2016. The book was a New York Times Editor's Choice. She is a recipient of a 2016 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a 2017-18 Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, and a 2018-19 fellowship at The Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, France.