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Rilla Askew (born 1951) is an American novelist and short story writer born in the Sans Bois Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma, where her family has lived for five generations. She graduated from the University of Tulsa in 1980 and went on to study creative writing at Brooklyn College, where she received her MFA in 1989.

Askew was a 2004 fellow at Civiella Ranieri in Umbertide, Italy, and a featured writer at the 2008 World Literature Today and Chinese Literature Conference in Beijing. In 2009 she received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in a variety of journals, and her story "The Killing Blanket" was selected for Prize Stories 1993: The O. Henry Awards. Askew's first novel "The Mercy Seat" was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dublin IMPAC Prize, was a Boston Globe Notable Book, and received the Oklahoma Book Award and the Western Heritage Award in 1998. In 2002 her novel "Fire in Beulah" received the American Book Award and the Myers Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. 'Fire in Beulah' is about the Tulsa, OK race riots. Askew's third novel, "Harpsong," is set in 1930's Oklahoma and speaks indirectly to John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath." "Harpsong" received the Oklahoma Book Award, the Western Heritage Award, the WILLA Award from Women Writing the West, and the Violet Crown Award from the Writers League of Texas in 2008. Askew has taught creative writing at Brooklyn College, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Central Oklahoma, Syracuse University, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her sister Ruth Askew Brelsford is the speech/drama chair at Eastern Oklahoma State College in Wilburton, OK. Askew is married to actor Paul Austin, and they divide their time between Oklahoma and the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York.

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