Ann Patchett Biography
Ann Patchett was born in Los Angeles in 1963 and raised in Nashville. She
attended Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. In
1990, she won a residential fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in
Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she wrote her first novel, The Patron
Saint of Liars. It was named a New York Times Notable Book for 1992. In
1993, she received a Bunting Fellowship from the Mary Ingrahm Bunting Institute
at Radcliffe College. Patchett's second novel, Taft, was awarded the
Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best work of fiction in 1994. Her third
novel, The Magician's Assistant, was short-listed for England's Orange
Prize and earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Her next novel, Bel Canto, won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the
Orange Prize in 2002, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle
Award. It was named the Book Sense Book of the Year. It sold over a million
copies in the United States and has been translated into thirty languages. In
2004, Patchett published Truth & Beauty, a memoir of her friendship with
the writer Lucy Grealy. It was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the
Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Entertainment Weekly. Truth
& Beauty was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won
the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize, the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from
the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Alex Award from the American
Library Association. Patchett is also the author of Run, What Now?, and State of Wonder.
She was the editor for Best American Short Stories 2006.
Patchett has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times
Magazine, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Gourmet, and
Vogue. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband, Karl VanDevender.
Her mother is the author Jeanne Ray, a former nurse and now bestselling novelist
of books such as Julie and Romeo, Step-Ball-Change and Eat
Cake.
This biography was last updated on 07/23/2011.
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