Judith Thurman | |
---|---|
Born | 1946 (age 77–78) New York City, U.S. |
Occupation | Writer, critic |
Alma mater | Brandeis University |
Genre | Essay, biography |
Judith Thurman (born 1946) [1] is an American writer, biographer, and critic. She is the recipient of the 1983 National Book Award for Nonfiction for her biography Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller. [2] [3] Her book Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette was a finalist for the 1999 nonfiction National Book Award. [4] In 2016, she received the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters . [5]
Thurman is a staff writer for The New Yorker . [6]
In 1967, Thurman graduated from Brandeis University with a bachelor's degree. [1] [7]
Thurman began her literary career as a poet and translator. The Covent Garden Press in London published her first book of poems, Putting My Coat On, in 1972. [8]
In the 1970s, Atheneum Books published I Became Alone, a book of essays on women poets for young people, [9] and a volume of poetry for children, Flashlight, which has been regularly anthologized for more than forty years. [10]
In 1973, Thurman returned to New York after five years in Europe and began to contribute to the newly launched Ms. magazine. [2] Her essays introduced relatively unknown women writers to a new audience. They included the French poet Louise Labé and the Mexican poet Juana Inés de la Cruz. Thurman's translations of their work appeared in the Penguin Book of Women Poets. [2] She also wrote about Gertrude Stein, Jean Rhys, Caryl Churchill, and Isak Dinesen, [11] among others. Thurman worked at Brooklyn College as an adjunct professor from 1973 to 1975. [12] For the remainder of the 1970s, Thurman had three publications while writing a biography. [13]
In the mid-1970s, Thurman began writing a biography on Isak Dinesen after being convinced by a representative from St. Martin's Press. During her eight year writing process, Thurman stopped writing her biography after experiencing writer's block and anxiety. After resuming her writing, Thurman's biography, Isak Dinesen: The Life of A Storyteller, was published by St. Martin's Press in 1982. [14] [15] It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, in 1983, [16] and served as the basis for Sydney Pollack's 1985 film Out of Africa , on which Thurman served as an Associate Producer. [17]
Thurman took leave to write a biography titled Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, which was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1999. [18] The book was noted as "effective at setting the morally subversive Colette in the social milieu of early-20th-century Paris." [19] The biography won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for biography and the Salon Book Award for biography. [20] [21] [22]
In 1987, Thurman began contributing to The New Yorker . [6] In 2000, she returned to The New Yorker as a staff writer, where she specialized in cultural criticism for over 20 years. A collection of her essays for the magazine, Cleopatra's Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007, [23] and was a New York Times Best Book of the Year. Swann Song was published in The Best American Essays of 2003.
Other remarkable The New Yorker [24] articles include: Exposure Time (2003), [25] The Roving Eye (2008), [26] First Impressions (2008), [27] Drawn from Life (2012), [28] and The Supreme Contradictions of Simone Weil (2024). [29]
Thurman is a recipient of the Harold G. Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; [30] the Order of Arts and Letters , from the French government; [5] and the Rungstedlund Award from the Karen Blixen Museum. [31]
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Baroness Karen Christenze von Blixen-Finecke was a Danish author who wrote in Danish and English. She is also known under her pen names Isak Dinesen, used in English-speaking countries; Tania Blixen, used in German-speaking countries; Osceola, and Pierre Andrézel.
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Stacy Madeleine Schiff is an American essayist. Her biography of Véra Nabokov won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Schiff has also written biographies of French aviator and author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, colonial American-era polymath and prime mover of America's founding, Benjamin Franklin, Franklin's fellow Founding Father Samuel Adams, ancient Egyptian queen Cleopatra, and the important figures and events of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692–93 in colonial Massachusetts.
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Out of Africa is a memoir by the Danish author Karen Blixen. The book, first published in 1937, recounts events of the eighteen years when Blixen made her home in Kenya, then called British East Africa. The book is a lyrical meditation on Blixen's life on her coffee plantation, as well as a tribute to some of the people who touched her life there. It provides a vivid snapshot of African colonial life in the last decades of the British Empire. Blixen wrote the book in English and then rewrote it in Danish. The book has sometimes been published under the author's pen name, Isak Dinesen.
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