In 2019, Deb Olin Unferth went to the Cafe Tissardmine artists’ residency in Morocco and spent nine days in a tent in the Sahara Desert—a place she had been dreaming of seeing her entire life. Being in the Sahara was revelatory, and treacherous. “I could barely survive in the desert,” Unferth says over Zoom from her home in Austin, Tex. “It was so hot at night. I had to sleep outside of the tent. Sand was blowing in my face. My eyes were getting stuck together.”
Unferth used the trip as inspiration for her new sci-fi novel, Earth 7, the story of a budding scientist who’s on a mission to save the planet, which has been ravaged by humans and become a desert wasteland. “It was crazy,” she says of her time in the elements. “There was sand in my nose, my mouth. But I had to see the Sahara.”
The trip also fueled Unferth’s obsession with sand—a subject she admits she knows way too much about. “Sand is a building block of civilization,” she says. “It’s found in everything from toothpaste to computers. I’ve read so many books about it. I am the person to write about it.”
And the experience allowed her to reflect on the ways humans are polluting and otherwise destroying the planet. “As I get older and see how things are falling apart, I’m more interested in looking at how to approach my work from a comical, serious, or research perspective,” she says. “I feel that it’s become more urgent to my soul.”
A Guggenheim fellow and Pushcart Prize winner, Unferth is the author of six previous works, including the 2007 story collection Minor Robberies, her fiction debut; the 2011 memoir Revolution, a chronicle of her travels across Central America when she was 18; and the 2020 novel Barn 8, about a plot to free chickens from a poultry farm. Barn 8 was a critical hit, appeared on several best-of-year lists, and is being adapted into a movie by Taika Waititi.
Unferth’s books are entertaining and stylish (think George Saunders and Karen Russell) and have moral and ethical anchors. She’s known for playing with form and genre conventions. “I don’t think a lot of people write like me,” she says. “I’m constantly reinventing what I think a novel should be.”
Earth 7, which will be released in June by Graywolf, has a sand-swept setting that calls to mind “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and showcases the humor and pathos of a Donald Barthelme story. It follows Dylan Stein, a young researcher in a bleak near-future world where people are coming up with new ways to survive—including moving to Mars and uploading their consciousnesses onto microchips.
When the book opens, Dylan is living in Sea Garden, an underwater pod community, with her scientist mother, who cares more about her work than parenting. Dylan leaves the pod to become a groundskeeper at a lab in the desert, and begins doing secret research on how to regenerate life on Earth. While visiting Vacationland for Singles, a VR-enhanced oasis, Dylan falls for Melanie, a woman who’s undergone so many cosmetic procedures to appear youthful that she’s frequently mistaken for a robot. The pair live in the desert, where Dylan ramps up her research and attracts the attention of a Martian who believes she’s in possession of a valuable collection of DNA traces of plants and animals—which he would certainly like to get his hands on.
Ethan Nosowsky, Unferth’s editor, has worked with her on multiple books and appreciates her gimlet eye and authorial vision. “Deb’s sentences snap me to attention,” he says. “She doesn’t sound like anybody else. There’s humor in her books, but also a strong political undercurrent.”
Unferth, who’s vegan, has a reverence for the natural world that’s on display throughout Earth 7, which is a love letter to the planet, a lamentation, and a cautionary tale. In 2024, while working on the novel, Unferth attended the Arctic Circle residency, a multi-week program that allows creatives to explore Norway’s Svalbard Archipelago and the Arctic Ocean by boat. “I needed to get into a different emotional place to finish the book,” she says. “If you die without seeing an iceberg, you’re missing out. It’s one of the great wonders of the world.”
Born in 1968 in Chicago, Unferth was a shy kid who was introduced to Kafka and Nabokov by her grandfather. (“I read inappropriate books endlessly,” she recalls.) In 1986, she left home for the University of Colorado in Boulder to study philosophy, and, in 1987, took a few months off from school to travel around Central America with her boyfriend—including to Nicaragua, which was in the midst of a revolution. “I was an idealistic teen,” Unferth says. “I didn’t know it was a crazy thing to do.”
Traveling abroad as a young woman, and getting harassed, was eye-opening. “I kept a glass bottle by my bed for protection,” she remembers. “The experience made me quite brave. That’s when I became a feminist.”
After graduating from Boulder in 1991, Unferth worked for a time at a homeless shelter in Chicago, then earned an MFA in fiction from Syracuse University. Before she published her first book at 37, she spent years churning out short stories and submitting them to magazines. “My mailbox would be so full of rejection letters that I couldn’t get it open,” she says.
Bill Clegg, Unferth’s agent, describes her as an innovator who never attempts the same project twice. “Once you start reading Deb, it’s just so exciting to imagine what she’s hatching next, because you haven’t seen it before,” Clegg says.
Unferth, who describes herself as a bit of a loner, divides her time between writing and teaching, and is a professor of creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin. She’s also the founder of Pen City Writers, a writing program at a South Texas penitentiary. When at home, she likes to write in a casita that she and her husband built at the back of their property, on the spot where a toolshed once stood. Her desk—piled high with books about sand—faces a window that looks out onto the yard. “Beginning in the spring, there are these great swirls of butterflies,” she says. “They’re so, so beautiful.”
Unferth will sometimes look out at the butterflies while contemplating what she wants to write next—a process that’s always rich with surprises. “My favorite fiction is stuff that digs deep into big questions about the meaning of life,” she says. “When things don’t do that I get bored quickly.”
