Bo Caldwell biography

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Bo Caldwell

Bo Caldwell

Bo Caldwell Biography

Bo Caldwell is the author of the national bestseller The Distant Land of My Father. Her short fiction has been published in Ploughshares, Story, Epoch, and other literary journals. A former Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford University, she lives in Northern California with her husband, novelist Ron Hansen.



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Interview

In two different interviews, Bo Caldwell explains how being diagnosed with stage one breast cancer affected her approach to completing City of Tranquil Light, and she answers questions about the inspiration for her novel - her grandparents' lives as missionaries in China.

This page includes two interviews with Bo Caldwell and a letter she wrote on her experience writing City of Tranquil Light. In the video Q&A below, she explains how being diagnosed with stage one breast cancer affected her approach to completing City of Tranquil Light, and in the written interview she answers questions about the inspiration for her novel - her grandparents' lives as missionaries in China.

A Video Q&A with Bo Caldwell




In Conversation with Bo Caldwell, Author of City of Tranquil Light

It's been nearly ten years since your first novel, The Distant Land of My Father, was published. What took you so long?

That's a question I've asked myself. Part of the answer is that life intervened. I started the novel in 2002 and wrote perhaps eighty pages, and although I didn't like them much, I've come to accept that mediocre first drafts are often part of my process. In 2004 I was diagnosed with stage-one breast cancer (I'm now healthy and cancer-free), so that fall and the first half of 2005 were given to chemo and radiation. It took another year for my head to clear enough to write fiction, and I returned to the novel in 2006 and finished it two years later. The other part of the answer is easy: I'm a...

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Books by this Author

Books by Bo Caldwell at BookBrowse
City of Tranquil Light jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Bo Caldwell 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 read-alikes

  • Mischa Berlinski

    Mischa Berlinski

    Fieldwork is Mischa's first novel, it won him a $50,000 Whiting Award in 2008. Peacekeeping: A Novel was published in 2016.

    Mischa Berlinski was born in New York in 1973. He studied classics at the University of California... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    City of Tranquil Light

    Try:
    Fieldwork
    by Mischa Berlinski

  • Dennis Bock

    Dennis Bock

    Dennis Bock is a Canadian novelist from Belleville, Ontario. His first book of stories, Olympia, won the 1998 Canadian Authors’ Association Jubilee Award, the inaugural Danuta Gleed Award for best first collection of ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    City of Tranquil Light

    Try:
    The Communist's Daughter
    by Dennis Bock

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