Julie Orringer is an American author born in Miami, Florida. Her first book, How to Breathe Underwater, was published in September 2003 by Knopf Publishing Group. She is a graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Best New American Voices, and The Best American Non-Required Reading. She received the Paris Review's Discovery Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, The Yale Review Editors' Prize, Ploughshares' Cohen Award, the Northern California Book Award, and the Anne and Robert Cowan Award from the Jewish Community Endowment Fund. She was the recipient of a 2004-5 NEA grant for her current project, a novel set in Budapest and Paris before and during the Second World War.