Sarah Chihaya (Sarah Anne Miki Chihaya, born c. 1984) is an American writer, professor, and literary critic. In 2020, she was one of several co-authors of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism, published by Columbia University Press.^[1] In 2025, she released her debut memoir, Bibliophobia, with Random House.^[2] Bibliophobia was a finalist for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize.^[3]

Chihaya grew up in Ohio as the child of Japanese and Japanese-Canadian immigrants.^[4]

She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University in 2005, studying English and French. Her undergraduate thesis was titled “Si chaotique, si morcelé: History and Fiction in Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures and Dora Bruder.”^[5]

Chihaya received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. Her doctoral dissertation, completed in Fall 2013, was titled “The Unseen World: Denarrative Desire in the Contemporary British Novel.”^[6]

Chihaya's book reviews, interviews, and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, The Yale Review, and other publications.^{[7][8][9][10][11]}

Chihaya has served as an English professor at Princeton University.^[12][13] She has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley and New York University.^[14]

In 2020, Chihaya was the co-author of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism alongside Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Juno Jill Richards.^[15] The book was published by Columbia University Press.^[1]

In 2023, Chihaya had earned a Whiting Award in Creative Nonfiction for her then-forthcoming debut memoir Bibliophobia. The judges stated: "Soul-baring, witty, and slyly provocative, Bibliophobia unsettles our most widespread and unexamined beliefs about books and reading."^[16]

In 2025, Chihaya released Bibliophobia, which discusses her complicated relationships to books along with several difficult experiences in her life.^[17] The New Republic called it "a welcome splash of lemony sourness to cut the bland sweetness of much popular discourse about books, which can tend toward boosterism, bibliotherapy, or... a nostalgic relation to books as objects and symbols that sometimes has little to do with the actual practice of reading."^[18]