Ann Patchett

Last updated
Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett apeaks during the Kennedy Center Honors Dinner at the State Department in Washington, D.C., Saturday, December 2, 2023 - (cropped).jpg
Patchett speaks during the Kennedy Center Honors, 2023
Born (1963-12-02) December 2, 1963 (age 60)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Occupation Novelist, memoirist
Education Sarah Lawrence College (BA)
University of Iowa (MFA)
Period1992–present
Genre Literary fiction
Notable works Bel Canto
Website
annpatchett.com

Ann Patchett (born December 2, 1963) is an American author. She received the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction in the same year, for her novel Bel Canto . [1] [2] Patchett's other novels include The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), [3] Taft (1994), [4] The Magician's Assistant (1997), Run (2007), [5] State of Wonder (2011), Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023). [6] The Dutch House was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. [7]

Contents

Biography

Ann Patchett was born on December 2, 1963, in Los Angeles, California, to Frank Patchett (a Los Angeles police captain who arrested Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan [8] ) and Jeanne Ray (a nurse who later became a novelist). [9] She is the younger of two daughters. Her mother and father divorced when she was young. Her mother remarried, and when Patchett was six years old the family moved to Nashville, Tennessee. [10]

Patchett attended St. Bernard Academy, a private Catholic school for girls in Nashville, Tennessee run by the Sisters of Mercy. [3] [4] Following graduation, she attended Sarah Lawrence College. [11] [4]

After college, she attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she lived with the memoirist and poet Lucy Grealy. Their time as roommates and their life-long friendship was the subject of her 2004 memoir Truth & Beauty .

In her early twenties Patchett married; however, the marriage lasted only about a year. [12]

In her late twenties, Patchett won a fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts; [3] during her time there, she wrote her first novel The Patron Saint of Liars, which was published in 1992. [3] [9]

In 2010, she co-founded a bookstore with Karen Hayes, Parnassus Books, in Nashville, Tennessee, which opened in November 2011. [13] In 2016, Parnassus Books expanded, adding a bookmobile to expand the reach of the bookstore in Nashville. [14]

Patchett lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband, Karl VanDevender. [15] It is Patchett’s second marriage. [16]

Writing

Patchett at the Miami Book Fair International 2014 Patchett, Ann MBFI.jpg
Patchett at the Miami Book Fair International 2014

Patchett's first published work was in The Paris Review , a story that appeared before she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College. [9]

For nine years, Patchett worked at Seventeen magazine, [3] where she wrote primarily non-fiction and the magazine published one of every five articles she wrote. She ended her relationship with the magazine after getting into a dispute with an editor and exclaiming, "I’ll never darken your door again!" [3]

Patchett has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker , The New York Times Magazine , The Washington Post , O, The Oprah Magazine , ELLE , GQ , Gourmet , and Vogue . [11] In 1992, Patchett published The Patron Saint of Liars. [4] The novel was made into a television movie of the same title in 1998. [17] Her second novel Taft won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in fiction in 1994. [4] Her third novel, The Magician’s Assistant , was released in 1997. [18] In 2001, her fourth novel Bel Canto was her breakthrough, becoming a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, [19] and winning the PEN/Faulkner Award. [1]

A friend of writer Lucy Grealy, Patchett has written a memoir about their relationship, Truth & Beauty: A Friendship . Patchett's novel, Run, [5] was released in October 2007. What now?, published in April 2008, is an essay based on a commencement speech she delivered at her alma mater in 2006.

Patchett is the editor of the 2006 volume of the anthology series The Best American Short Stories . [20] In 2011, she published State of Wonder , a novel set in the Amazon jungle, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. [2] [21] In 2016 she published her novel Commonwealth to widespread critical acclaim. Patchett called the book her "autobiographical first novel," explaining, “The wonderful thing about publishing this book at 52 is that I know that I am [already] capable of working from a place of deep imagination.” [22]

In 2019, Patchett published her first children's book, Lambslide, [23] and the novel The Dutch House, [24] a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. [25]

In November 2021, she published These Precious Days , an essay collection she describes as the sequel to This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. These Precious Days received wide acclaim, with review aggregator Book Marks rating it a “rave” based on 25 reviews. [26] In 2023, Ann Patchett published a novel called Tom Lake, and it was ranked a The New York Times Best Sellers. [27]

Her work has been translated into more than 30 languages. [28]

Awards and honors

For specific works

For corpus

Published works

Novels

Nonfiction

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louise Erdrich</span> Native American author in Minnesota (born 1954)

Karen Louise Erdrich is a Native American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians of North Dakota, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Margaret Atwood</span> Canadian writer (born 1939)

Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a Canadian novelist, poet, and literary critic. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of nonfiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children's books, two graphic novels, and a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Her best-known work is the 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television.

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2002.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Choi</span> American novelist (born 1969)

Susan Choi is an American novelist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lucy Grealy</span> American poet

Lucinda Margaret Grealy was an Irish-American poet and memoirist who wrote Autobiography of a Face in 1994. This critically acclaimed book describes her childhood and early adolescent experience with cancer of the jaw, which left her with some facial disfigurement. In a 1994 interview with Charlie Rose conducted right before she rose to the height of her fame, Grealy stated that she considered her book to be primarily about the issue of "identity."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marilynne Robinson</span> American novelist and essayist (born 1943)

Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aleksandar Hemon</span> Bosnian-American author, essayist, critic, television writer and screenwriter

Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian-American author, essayist, critic, television writer, and screenwriter. He is best known for the novels Nowhere Man (2002) and The Lazarus Project (2008), and his scriptwriting as a co-writer of The Matrix Resurrections (2021).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nicole Krauss</span> American novelist (born 1974)

Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017), which have been translated into 35 languages. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003, Best American Short Stories 2008 and Best American Short Stories 2019. In 2011, Nicole Krauss won an award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for Great House. A collection of her short stories, To Be a Man, was published in 2020 and won the Wingate Literary Prize in 2022.

<i>Bel Canto</i> (novel) 2001 novel by Ann Patchett

Bel Canto is the fourth novel by American author Ann Patchett, published in 2001 by Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. It was awarded both the Orange Prize for Fiction and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. It was placed on several top book lists, including Amazon's Best Books of the Year (2001). It was also adapted into an opera in 2015.

<i>Run</i> (novel) 2007 novel by Ann Patchett

Run is a 2007 novel by American author Ann Patchett. It was her first novel after the widely successful Bel Canto (2001).

Robert S. Jones was an American novelist and editor. He was born in Santa Monica, California.

<i>State of Wonder</i> 2011 novel by Ann Patchett

State of Wonder is a 2011 novel by American author Ann Patchett. It is the story of pharmacologist Marina Singh, who journeys to Brazil to bring back information about seemingly miraculous drug research being conducted there by her former teacher, Dr. Annick Swenson. The book was published by Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom and by Harper in the United States. It was critically well received, and was nominated for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction, among other nominations.

<i>The Patron Saint of Liars</i> (novel) 1992 novel by Ann Patchett

The Patron Saint of Liars is a 1992 novel, written by Ann Patchett. This is the first novel published by Patchett, and it was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Patchett completed the manuscript for The Patron Saint of Liars during a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The novel focuses on a young woman named Rose who abandons her life in California as a married woman. She leaves for Kentucky and takes residence at a home for unwed mothers that is owned by the Catholic Church. As she watches girls give birth and disappear from the home, she must think of her own plans and what the future has in store for her.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diana Evans</span> British novelist, journalist and critic (born 1972)

Diana Omo Evans FRSL is a British novelist, journalist and critic who was born and lives in London. Evans has written four full-length novels. Her first novel, 26a, published in 2005, won the Orange Award for New Writers, the Betty Trask Award and the deciBel Writer of the Year award. Her third novel Ordinary People was shortlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction and won the 2019 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature. A House for Alice was published in 2023.

Bel Canto is an opera by Peruvian composer Jimmy López. Based on the 2001 novel of the same name by Ann Patchett, the work uses a libretto by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz. The libretto is sung in Spanish, English, Japanese, Russian, German, French, Latin, Italian, and Quechua. It was commissioned by the Lyric Opera of Chicago as part of the Renée Fleming initiative. Sir Andrew Davis conducted, and director Kevin Newbury staged the work. The cast included Danielle de Niese as Roxane Coss, J’Nai Bridges as Carmen, Jeongcheol Cha as Hosokawa, and Andrew Stenson as Gen.

<i>Commonwealth</i> (Patchett novel) Book by Ann Patchett

Commonwealth is the seventh novel by American author Ann Patchett, published in 2016. The novel begins with an illicit kiss that leads to an affair that destroys two marriages and creates a reluctantly blended family. In a series of vignettes spanning fifty years, it tells the story of the six children whose lives were disrupted and how they intertwined.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Acevedo</span> Dominican-American poet and author

Elizabeth Acevedo is a Dominican-American poet and author. In September 2022, the Poetry Foundation named her the year's Young People's Poet Laureate.

<i>The Dutch House</i> (novel) 2019 novel by Ann Patchett

The Dutch House is a 2019 novel by Ann Patchett. It was published by Harper on September 24, 2019. It tells the story of a brother and sister, Danny and Maeve Conroy, who grow up in a mansion known as the Dutch House, and their lives over five decades.

<i>These Precious Days</i> 2021 essay collection by Ann Patchett

These Precious Days is a 2021 essay collection by American writer Ann Patchett. It received “rave” reviews and became a New York Times best seller.

<i>Truth & Beauty: A Friendship</i> Memoir by Ann Patchett

Truth & Beauty: A Friendship is a memoir by Ann Patchett. First published in 2004 by Harper Perennial the memoir focuses on Patchett's 18 year friendship with memoirist Lucy Grealy which began when they were 21.

References

  1. 1 2 3 PEN/Faulkner Staff (2002). "Past Winners & Finalists: 2002—Ann Patchett, Bel Canto". penfaulkner.org. Archived from the original on 21 December 2013. Retrieved 14 September 2016.
  2. 1 2 3 Mark Brown (April 17, 2012). "Orange Prize 2012 Shortlist Puts Ann Patchett in Running for Second Victory". The Guardian. Retrieved May 14, 2022.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Weich, Dave; Patchett, Ann (June 27, 2001). "Exclusive to Powell's, Author Interviews: Ann Patchett Hits All the Right Notes". Archived from the original on February 4, 2006. Retrieved 2022-05-14.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Dukes, Jessica; Patchett, Ann. "Meet the Writers: Ann Patchett". barnesandnoble.com. Archived from the original on 8 June 2007. Retrieved 2007-07-02.
  5. 1 2 Hart, Jennifer; Patchett, Ann (September 24, 2008). "Book Club Girl Talks With Ann Patchett, Author of Run" . Retrieved 14 September 2016.
  6. ↑ "Ann Patchett". Goodreads. Retrieved 2016-11-04.
  7. ↑ Maher, John (May 4, 2020). "Moser, Whitehead, McDaniel, Grandin, Boyer, Brown Win 2020 Pulitzers". Publishers Weekly . Retrieved 2022-05-14.
  8. ↑ Lesser, Wendy (22 November 2013). "What's In Store". The New York Times. New York. Retrieved 6 July 2022.
  9. 1 2 3 Lundquist, Molly. "State of Wonder - Ann Patchett - Author Biography - LitLovers". www.litlovers.com. Retrieved 2022-05-14.
  10. ↑ Giles, Wanda H.; Bonner, J. H. (2009). Twenty-First-Century American Novelists: Second Series. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 350. Detroit: Gale Cengage Learning. ISBN   9780787681685 – via Literature Resource Center. Ann Patchett
  11. 1 2 Patchett, Ann. "About Ann" (autobiography). annpatchett.com. Retrieved 14 September 2016.
  12. ↑ Alex Witchel (2021-11-30). "Ann Patchett Has Thoughts on a Bunch of Subjects". The New York Times. Retrieved 2022-05-14.
  13. ↑ Patchett, Ann (December 2012). "The Bookstore Strikes Back". The Atlantic . Retrieved March 6, 2014.
  14. ↑ Alter, Alexandra (Mar 24, 2016). "Ann Patchett's Nashville Bookstore Hits the Road, With Dogs in Tow". The New York Times. Retrieved 2022-05-14.
  15. ↑ "Ann Patchett". Amazon.com.
  16. ↑ Puig, Claudia. "'A Happy Marriage' weds Patchett's prose to essays". USA TODAY. Retrieved 2021-12-14.
  17. ↑ Gyllenhaal, Stephen (1998-04-05), The Patron Saint of Liars , retrieved 2016-11-11
  18. ↑ "The Magician's Assistant". seattlecentral.edu. Retrieved 2016-11-11.
  19. 1 2 NBCC Staff (2001). "All Past National Book Critics Circle Award Winners and Finalists: 2001 Awards, Fiction Finalists". bookcritics.org [National Book Critics Circle]. Archived from the original on 18 October 2015. Retrieved 14 September 2016.
  20. ↑ Books, Used, New, and Out of Print Books - We Buy and Sell - Powell's. "Best American Short Stories 2006 by Patchett, Ann". www.powells.com. Retrieved 2016-10-07.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  21. ↑ "Orange prize shortlist 2012 - in pictures". the Guardian. 2012-04-17. Retrieved 2016-11-11.
  22. ↑ Patchett, Ann (September 8, 2017). "Ann Patchett Calls 'Commonwealth' Her 'Autobiographical First Novel'". NPR.org. Retrieved January 21, 2021.
  23. ↑ Hilboldt Allport, Brandy (4 May 2019). "Read All About It: Patchett tries hand at children's book with 'Lambslide'". The Florida Times-Union. Retrieved 2020-04-28.
  24. ↑ "Ann Patchett Explains Why She Had to Totally Rewrite her New Novel 'The Dutch House' And Her Problem with Villains". Time. Retrieved 2020-04-28.
  25. ↑ Maher, John (May 4, 2020). "Moser, Whitehead, McDaniel, Grandin, Boyer, Brown Win 2020 Pulitzers". Publishers Weekly . Retrieved January 22, 2021.
  26. ↑ "Book Marks reviews of These Precious Days: Essays by Ann Patchett". Book Marks. Retrieved 2021-12-14.
  27. ↑ "Combined Print & E-Book Fiction - Best Sellers - Books - The New York Times". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2023-09-28.
  28. ↑ "In "These Precious Days," Ann Patchett reflects on her life and art". WYPR. Retrieved 2022-04-02.
  29. ↑ Owens, Ann Marie Deer. "Vanderbilt Libraries host conversation with Moser and Patchett". Vanderbilt University. Retrieved 2019-09-29.
  30. ↑ "Ann Patchett Wins Orange Prize for Fiction 2002". WritersWrite.com. Writers Write Inc. 27 June 2002. Retrieved May 14, 2022.
  31. ↑ "Book Sense Book of the Year - Book awards - LibraryThing" . Retrieved 2018-03-16.
  32. ↑ Wellcome Collection Staff (2011). "All books A-Z: State of Wonder, By Ann PatchettS, Shortlist 2011". wellcomebookprize.org [Wellcome Collection's Wellcome Book Prize]. Retrieved 14 September 2016.
  33. ↑ Guggenheim Fndn. Staff (1995). "Fellows: Ann Patchett, 1995; Field of Study, Fiction". gf.org [John and Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation]. Retrieved 14 September 2016.
  34. ↑ Elizabeth Gilbert (April 18, 2012). "The World's 100 Most Influential People, 2012: Ann Patchett, Writer". Time . Archived from the original on April 19, 2012. Retrieved 14 September 2016.
  35. ↑ Watts, James D. Jr. (March 30, 2014). "Ann Patchett is 2014 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award Recipient". Tulsa World . Retrieved 14 September 2016.
  36. ↑ "Kenyon Review for Literary Achievement". KenyonReview.org. Archived from the original on 2018-01-09. Retrieved 2017-08-20.
  37. ↑ "2017 Newly Elected Members – American Academy of Arts and Letters". artsandletters.org. Retrieved 2021-12-14.
  38. ↑ "Chance the Rapper, Ann Patchett and Cristina Henríquez win 2024 Library Foundation awards". Chicago Tribune. 2024-06-25. Retrieved 2024-06-26.
  39. ↑ "Meet the 2024 Library Foundation Award Honorees". Chicago Public Library Foundation. Retrieved 2024-06-26.
  40. ↑ Kellogg, Carolyn (August 29, 2011). "Ann Patchett's lessons on writing, from Byliner". Los Angeles Times.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.