No One Belongs Here More Than You

American writer Miranda July is really … unusual. For a start, she refuses to be boxed in to any one category. She is a writer, performance artist, musician, provocateur, actor and film director. Her first full-length movie, Me and You and Everyone We Know, came out of a workshop she did at the Sundance Festival. July wrote, directed and starred in the offbeat, poetic, gently funny love story, and it won her numerous awards, including the Caméra d'or at Cannes.

Her fiction has the same almost surreal quality; these are recognisable people but they often behave in a way that suggests they're struggling to remember what society expects of them. They're doing their best, but sometimes the results are, well … unusual.

July might never gain the kind of name-recognition already achieved by her peers, such as Dave Eggars. Then again, with her anything is possible. One thing's for sure: she is a talent worth knowing about. For a taste of her off-kilter writing, click here and read the short story "The Shared Patio", from her most recent collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You.

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