Tana French biography

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Readalikes

Tana French

Tana French

Tana French Biography

Tana French is also the author of In the Woods, The Likeness, Faithful Place, Broken Harbor, The Secret Place and The Trespasser. Her books have won awards including the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry awards, the Los Angeles Times Award for Best Mystery/Thriller, and the Irish Book Award for Crime Fiction. She lives in Dublin with her family.

Tana French's website

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Interview

Tana French talks about The Likeness, the sequel to her successful debut novel, In The Woods, and explores the characters in the book, their motivations, and how her experiences made them come alive.

Q: How has your background in theater helped you create your characters?

A: When you get right down to it, writing – or at least writing in the first person, which is what I do – is basically the same skill as acting. For years, my job as an actor was to create a character – hopefully a full, three-dimensional character – and spend hours a day operating completely from her perspective, bringing an audience into her world. Writing is just an extension of that process. These days, my job is to create a narrator and see everything through her eyes, filter it through her perceptions and describe it in her voice, so I can draw readers into her world. I play my narrator on paper, rather than on stage, but the mental process is the same. Writing scenes with a lot of characters gets complicated – I have to 'play' all of them at once, juggle all their perspectives and motivations in my head – but it's still that same skill. I keep meaning to e-mail my old acting teacher and thank him!


Q: Are any of the characters in The Likeness based on anyone you know?

A: No, I don't base characters on real people. As soon as you do that, you're limited by what you know about the real ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Tana French at BookBrowse
The Searcher jacket The Witch Elm jacket The Trespasser jacket The Secret Place jacket
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Readalikes

All the books below are recommended as readalikes for Tana French but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose readalikes

  • Kate Atkinson

    Kate Atkinson

    Kate Atkinson won the Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year prize with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Her four bestselling novels featuring former detective Jackson Brodie became the BBC television series ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    The Likeness

    Try:
    Started Early, Took My Dog
    by Kate Atkinson

  • Author Image Not Available

    Jean-Luc Bannalec

    Jean-Luc Bannalec is a pseudonym. The author divides his time between Germany and coastal Brittany, France. Death in Brittany, the first case for Commissaire Dupin, was published in German in March 2012 and sold 600,000 ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    The Secret Place

    Try:
    Death in Brittany
    by Jean-Luc Bannalec

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