Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Daniel Mason was born and raised in Northern California. He studied biology at Harvard, and medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. His first novel, The Piano Tuner, published in 2002, was a national bestseller and has since been published in 27 countries. His other works include A Far Country, The Winter Soldier, and A Registry of My Passage Upon Earth, and his writing has appeared in Harper's Magazine and Lapham's Quarterly. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Daniel Mason's website
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It has been over 11 years since your last novel, A Far Country, was published. Can you describe how The Winter Soldier came about?
I think it is probably closer to 14 or 15 years— I began thinking of some of the characters back in 2003, during my last year of medical school. But I put aside those early sketches to work more fully on A Far Country. When I finally began working on The Winter Soldier full-time, it was a very different novel from the book I eventually would finish. I had originally been drawn to World War One and the interwar period because of my interest in the early study of the art of asylum patients, and the first version of the book involved a triangle of a patient, her husband, and her doctor. I struggled a lot with this version-- for almost six years and at least three drafts. Meanwhile, over the course of this time, I kept returning to this historical moment when the Austro-Hungarian army, utterly unprepared for the war, enlisted medical students with virtually no clinical experience for posts of extraordinary responsibility. As someone who had recently graduated from medical school, I was stunned to imagine these other students, across time and space, finding themselves suddenly in charge of entire ...
Audrey Blake is the pseudonym of Jaima Fixsen and Regina Sirois, two authors who met online in a survivor style writing contest. They live 1500 miles apart, but both are prairie girls: Jaima hails from Alberta, Canada, and ... (more)
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Ash Davidson was born in Arcata, California, and attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work has been supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts and MacDowell. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona. (more)
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