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 citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians of North Dakota, a federally recognized Ojibwe people.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2002.
Alice McDermott is an American writer and university professor. She is the author of nine novels and a collection of essays. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Orange Prize. That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent novel, Absolution was awarded the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.
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."
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.
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).
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.
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.
Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. Her short story collection Wednesday's Child was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
Run is a 2007 novel by American author Ann Patchett. It was her first novel after the widely successful Bel Canto (2001).
Hannah Tinti is an American writer and the co-founder of One Story magazine. She is the winner of the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing, the American Library Association’s Alex Award, and The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize.
Robert S. Jones was an American novelist and editor. He was born in Santa Monica, California.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Elizabeth Acevedo is an American poet and author. In September 2022, the Poetry Foundation named her the year's Young People's Poet Laureate.
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.
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.
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.
