Lydia Millet is an American novelist and conservationist. Her third novel, My Happy Life, won the 2003 PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, and she has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize as well as a Guggenheim fellow, among other honors. Millet has written books and stories that range from the philosophical to the satirical, on matters including the inventors of the atom bomb, political culture under George H.W. Bush, the discovery of mermaids in a coral reef, and the crises of extinction and climate change. Millet served as a fiction judge for the 2009 National Book Awards. She lives in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona with her two children and works for the Center for Biological Diversity.