Ruth Setton

Ruth Knafo Setton was born in Morocco, a few hours from the Djma el Fna’a, the fabled square of Marrakech, where every night for the past thousand years, the storyteller weaves a web of magic around his audience. Setton must have absorbed the imaginative power of story because when she received her first diary, the first words she wrote were: “I want to be a writer.” Years later, she studied magic with some of the world’s greatest magicians and wondered if she could recreate the sense of wonder they created with a pen instead of a wand. Among other things, Setton has survived being sawed in half, and then in thirds. She broke free from a straitjacket in front of an audience of thirty male magicians. She sailed around the world on a ship (three times) and taught courses in literature and writing while typhoons rocked the ship and waves crashed against the windows. She flew in a hot air balloon over the alien moon landscape of Cappadocia, Turkey, and attended a sacred gathering of Huichol shamans in the Sierra Madre Mountains where they ritually sacrificed a goat.
Professionally, she is the author of the novels, The Road to Fez, and the forthcoming Zigzag Girl. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, PEN, and Writer’s Digest. Her stories have won First Prize in the Launch Pad Prose Competition, the Katherine Anne Porter Award for Fiction, the Rick diMarinis Fiction Award, Saturday Evening Post’s Great American Fiction contest, and the Jerry Jazz Musician Fiction Award. Her feature film script, Water Street, received honors from many screenwriting competitions, including Austin Film Festival, Sundance Screenwriters’ Lab, and Page International Screenwriting Awards. Her novel, Zigzag Girl, won Grand Prize in the ScreenCraft Cinematic Book Competition, First Prize in the Daphne Awards, and was a finalist for Killer Nashville’s Claymore Award. Her pilot script for a limited series based on her novel, Zigzag Girl, won First Prize at the 2024 Los Angeles Crime and Horror Film Festival. She has taught creative writing at Lehigh University and Semester at Sea, and she’s working on a new novel.