Anita Shreve grew up in Dedham, Massachusetts. Her approimately 20 novels include The Pilot's Wife, The Weight of
Water, Eden Close, Strange Fits of Passion, Where or When, and Resistance.
Anita Shreve began writing fiction while working as a high school teacher after graduating from Tufts University.
Although one of her first published stories, "Past the Island,
Drifting," was awarded an O. Henry Prize in 1975, Shreve felt she couldn't
make a living as a fiction writer so she became a journalist. She traveled to
Africa and spent three years in Kenya, writing articles that appeared in
magazines such as Quest, US, and Newsweek. Back in the United
States, she turned to raising her children and writing freelance articles for
magazines. Shreve later expanded two of these articles -- both published in the New
York Times Magazine -- into the nonfiction books Remaking Motherhood
and Women Together, Women Alone. At the same time Shreve also began
working on her first novel, Eden Close. With its publication in 1989,
she gave up journalism for writing fiction full time, thrilled, as she says,
with "the rush of freedom that I could make it up."
She died of cancer, aged 71, in late March 2018. She had announced her illness almost a year earlier, writing on Facebook: "This is a hard post to write. I have so been looking forward to going on book tour for my new novel, The Stars are Fire, and had hoped to meet many of you on my travels."
Anita Shreve's website
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