Scott is the author of seven books, including the 1997 Pulitzer Prize finalist The Manikin and the critically acclaimed Make Believe and Tourmaline.

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. Her stories have been included in Best American Stories and The Pushcart Prize. In 1992, she won the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from The Paris Review for her story "A Borderline Case." Her latest book Liberation was published in February 2008.