Lisa Alther | |
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Born | Kingsport, Tennessee, U.S. | July 23, 1944
Occupation |
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Education | Wellesley College (BA) |
Children | 1 |
Website | |
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Lisa Alther (born July 23, 1944) is an American author and novelist. [1] [2]
Alther was born in Kingsport, Tennessee, in 1944. Her father was a surgeon, while her mother was a homemaker. She has three brothers and a sister. [3]
She graduated from Wellesley College with a B.A. in English literature in 1966. She then attended the Publishing Procedures Course at Radcliffe College.
After graduation Alther worked briefly for Atheneum Publishers in New York before moving to rural Vermont. Alther wrote fiction steadily for years, without success, collecting more than 250 rejection slips without getting published. She was stubborn however, and determined to succeed. When she finally succeeded, with Kinflicks in 1975, the novel was phenomenally successful. [4]
Alther now divides her time among East Tennessee, Vermont, and New York City. She has one daughter. [5]
Alther is the author of six contemporary novels, Kinflicks, Original Sins, Other Women, Bedrock, Five Minutes In Heaven, and Swan Song, as well as a small number of published short stories and many magazine articles. She also wrote Washed in the Blood, a three-part historical novel concerning the earliest European settlement of the southern Appalachians. All of her novels include lesbian or bisexual women characters. [6] She is also known for her humor writing. [7]
She has also written two non-fiction books, Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree—the Search for My Melungeon Ancestors (2007; ISBN 1-55970-832-8) and Blood Feud: The Hatfields and the McCoys: The Epic Story of Murder and Vengeance (2012; ISBN 978-0762779185).
Alther has taught Southern fiction at Saint Michael's College in Winooski, Vermont, and at East Tennessee State University, where she was awarded the Basler Chair. [3]
Between 1978 and 1980, Alther lived in London, where she became friends with Doris Lessing. Lessing took an interest in Kinflicks and helped get the work published in London through a contact at Alfred A. Knopf. [8]
It was through Lessing that Alther met the writer, thinker and teacher of Sufi mysticism, Idries Shah. Shah had adapted many Sufi classical works and teaching stories for contemporary readers, and, taking a great interest in these works, Alther read them all, [8] and she also wrote reviews for Shah's books, such as World Tales . [9] In 2020 Alther received the Idries Shah Foundation Award for Human Achievement for “contributions to literature.” [10]
Doris May Lessing was a British novelist. She was born to British parents in Iran, where she lived until 1925. Her family then moved to Southern Rhodesia, where she remained until moving in 1949 to London, England. Her novels include The Grass Is Singing (1950), the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (1952–1969), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983).
Idries Shah, also known as Idris Shah, Indries Shah, né Sayed Idries el-Hashimi and by the pen name Arkon Daraul, was an Afghan author, thinker and teacher in the Sufi tradition. Shah wrote over three dozen books on topics ranging from psychology and spirituality to travelogues and culture studies.
Melungeon was a slur historically applied to individuals and families of mixed-race ancestry with roots in colonial Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina primarily descended from free people of color and white settlers. In modern times, the term has been reclaimed by descendants of these families, especially in southern Appalachia. Despite this mixed heritage, many modern Melungeons pass as white, as did many of their ancestors.
Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta is a 1979 science fiction novel by Doris Lessing, and is the first book in her five-book Canopus in Argos series. It was first published in the United States in December 1980 by Alfred A. Knopf, and in the United Kingdom in November 1979 by Jonathan Cape. Shikasta is also the name of the fictional planet featured in the novel.
Bina Shah is a Pakistani writer, columnist and blogger living in Karachi.
Will Allen Dromgoole was an author and poet born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. She wrote over 7,501 poems; 5,000 essays; and published thirteen books. She was renowned beyond the South; her poem "The Bridge Builder" was often reprinted. It remains quite popular. The final stanza of the poem appears on a plaque at the Bellows Falls, Vermont Vilas Bridge, spanning the Connecticut River between southern Vermont and New Hampshire.
Susan Shwartz is an American author.
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five is a 1980 science fiction novel by Doris Lessing. It is the second book in her five-book Canopus in Argos series, the first being Shikasta (1979). It was first published in the United States in March 1980 by Alfred A. Knopf, and in the United Kingdom in May 1980 by Jonathan Cape.
Tahir Shah is a British author, journalist and documentary maker of Afghan-Indian descent.
Janrae Frank was an American journalist, writer and editor known primarily for her work in science fiction and fantasy. She wrote extensively on the subject of women and feminism in speculative fiction.
Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah was an Indian-Afghan author and diplomat descended from the Sadaat of Paghman. Born and educated in India, he came to Britain as a young man to continue his education in Edinburgh, where he married a young Scotswoman.
Virginia Easley DeMarce is an American historian who specializes in early modern European history, as well as a New York Times Best Selling author in the 1632 series collaborative fiction project. She has done genealogical work on the origins of the Melungeon peoples.
Amina Maxwell-Hudson was a British anthologiser of Sufi stories and folk tales, and was for many years the Chairperson of the College of Storytellers. She was the sister of the Sufi writers Idries Shah and Omar Ali-Shah, and the daughter of Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah and Saira Elizabeth Luiza Shah, a Scottish woman. Her nephew is the travel writer and documentary filmmaker Tahir Shah; her nieces are Safia Shah and the writer and documentary filmmaker Saira Shah.
World Tales, subtitled "The Extraordinary Coincidence of Stories Told in All Times, in All Places" is a book of 65 folk tales collected by Idries Shah from around the world, mostly from literary sources. Some of the tales are very current, others are less well known.
Octagon Press was a cross-cultural publishing house based in London, UK. It was founded in 1960 by Sufi teacher, Idries Shah to establish the historical and cultural context for his ideas. The company ceased trading in 2014.
Caravan of Dreams is a book by Idries Shah first published in 1968 by Octagon Press as part of his presentation of traditional Eastern teachings and Sufi ideas for contemporary society. New editions of the book were published in 2015 by The Idries Shah Foundation.
Yaa Gyasi is a Ghanaian American novelist. Her work, most notably her 2016 debut novel Homegoing and her 2020 novel Transcendent Kingdom, features themes of lineage, generational trauma, and Black and African identities. At the age of 26, Gyasi won the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for Best First Book, the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" honors for 2016 and the 2017 American Book Award. She was awarded a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature in 2020. As of 2019, Gyasi lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Kara Kush, subtitled The Gold of Ahmad Shah, is an adventure novel by the Anglo–Afghan writer, thinker and teacher in the Sufi mystical tradition, Idries Shah.
The Hum and the Shiver is an urban fantasy novel by American writer Alex Bledsoe, first published in the United States in September 2011 by Tor Books. It is the first in a series of six books by Bledsoe about the Tufa living in a remote Appalachian valley in East Tennessee. The Tufa are descendants of Irish fairies and were found in the area when the first European settlers arrived.
Alberta Leona Pierson Hannum was an author best known for her best-selling novel Roseanna McCoy, a fictionalized account of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, which was turned into a motion picture in 1949 by RKO General.
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