Livesey's stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and a number of literary quarterlies.[2][3] She was formerly the fiction editor at Ploughshares, an American literary journal. Livesey served as a judge for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction in 2012.[4]
Livesey was raised on the grounds of what was then a Scottish private boys' school, Glenalmond College, approximately 50 miles north of Edinburgh.[7] Her father, John Kenneth Livesey, was a teacher at the school, while her mother, Eva Barbara (McEwen) Livesey, was a nurse. Her mother died when Livesey was two years old and her father remarried.[8]
After earning a Bachelors of Arts at the University of York, where she read philosophy and English, Livesey began to spend time in Toronto where she waitressed to support herself as she pursued writing fiction.[6] Her first fiction publication was a short story, "Someone Else's," in Prism International in 1976.[9]
In 1983, Livesey joined the faculty at Tufts University and in 1986 published her first book, a collection of stories, which included nine short stories, and a novella, "Learning By Heart," which gave the volume its title.
Her first novel, Homework, appeared in 1990. The story of an Edinburgh book editor who enters a relationship with the father of a disturbed child, the novel was short listed for the W.H. Smith first novel in Canada award.[11]
Livesey has followed Homework with seven other novels to date, beginning with Criminals (1996), about a banker who finds an abandoned infant in a bus station restroom and ends up leaving the baby with his sister. Four years later (in 2000), she published The Missing World, about a woman who loses her memory of the last three years and whose duplicitous former boyfriend exploits that loss to resume their relationship.
The Missing World was followed a year later by Eva Moves the Furniture (2001), a novel that took Livesey twelve years to write, in part because it drew more closely on her own life than her previous works. She based the novel's eponymous protagonist on stories she had heard about her mother, Eva McEwen, and especially about her relationship with the supernatural. Like the real Eva, the fictional Eva loses her mother in childbirth. The loss brings her two unexpected companions: the spirits of a young girl and an older woman, who follow Eva through her life, influencing it, sometimes rearranging the furniture, and sometimes causing trouble.[12]
Banishing Verona, Livesey's fourth novel, appeared in 2004. Told from alternating points of view, the novel centers on two characters—Zeke, a twenty-something house painter with Asperger's and Verona, a radio host in her late 30s. The two meet in the novel's opening pages, when Verona, single and seven months pregnant, shows up at the house where Zeke is working, claiming to be related to its owners who have left town. When Zeke returns the next morning, he discovers that Verona is gone; the two spend the rest of the novel trying to reconnect.
In 2008, Livesey published The House on Fortune Street, a novel constructed of four interwoven narratives: two centered on women, Abigail, an actress who owns the titular house, and Dara, a therapist who rents the downstairs apartment, and two on men: Abigail's academic boyfriend, Sean, who is working on his dissertation about John Keats, and Dara's estranged father, Cameron, a photographer who struggles with his feelings for young girls. Each character's section possesses what Livesey calls a "literary godparent," a writer whose work in some way influences the character's life: For Sean, it's Keats; for Abigail, it's Charles Dickens; for Dara it's Charlotte Brontë, and for Cameron, it's Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll).[13]
Livesey's next novel, The Flight of Gemma Hardy (2012), again connects its main character to a literary figure, as Livesey set out to write a reimagining of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, a novel that had influenced her since she encountered it as a young girl.[14] Livesey set her novel in 1950s and 60s Scotland, and much of it echoes the story of Brontë's novel. Gemma, an orphan, is shunted off to do menial work at a school. Not long after she turns 18, she moves to the Orkney Islands to work as a governess and meets a wealthy man, Hugh Sinclair. The two seem to be moving toward marriage until Gemma learns a secret that causes her to feel betrayed. Livesey does not, however, follow Jane Eyre in every respect. In a notable departure from the original, Gemma's father is Icelandic. Her quest to discover her heritage is a crucial part of the narrative.[15]
Livesey followed The Flight of Gemma Hardy with Mercury (2016), a novel about a couple struggling in a strained marriage. The first section is narrated by Donald, a Scotsman who has immigrated to the United States where he lives in Boston and works as an optometrist. Although his profession is to help others see more clearly, Donald struggles to see even some of the most obvious truths about his life. The second section is narrated by Viv who used to work in mutual funds and now works at a stable. There, she encounters a horse, Mercury, whom she considers "the most amazing horse [she'd] ever seen."[16] As she dreams about competing on Mercury, Viv begins to feel hopeful about her life again. When she fears that someone is trying to harm him, she acquires a gun, precipitating a traumatic event that changes the lives of her and her family.
The year after Mercury appeared, Livesey published The Hidden Machinery, a collection of essays about writing; many of the essays had begun as lectures she had given as a teacher at a university or at a writers’ conference.[17]
Livesey's ninth novel, The Boy in the Field, was published in August 2020. At year's end, the New York Times cited it among its 100 Notable Books for the Year.[18] Her tenth novel, The Road from Belhaven (Knopf) was published in February 2024.[19]
Awards and honors
Massachusetts Book Award, 2018
Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, 2012-3
NEIBA Award, 2012
2009 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award, The House on Fortune Street
Emily Jane Brontë was an English novelist and poet who is best known for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. She also published a book of poetry with her sisters Charlotte and Anne titled Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell with her own poems finding regard as poetic genius. Emily was the second-youngest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother Branwell. She published under the pen name Ellis Bell.
Wuthering Heights is the only novel by the English author Emily Brontë, initially published in 1847 under her pen name "Ellis Bell". It concerns two families of the landed gentry living on the West Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and their turbulent relationships with the Earnshaws' foster son, Heathcliff. The novel, influenced by Romanticism and Gothic fiction, is considered a classic of English literature.
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, often referred to as Mrs Gaskell, was an English novelist, biographer, and short story writer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was published in 1848. Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857, was the first biography of Charlotte Brontë. In this biography, she wrote only of the moral, sophisticated things in Brontë's life; the rest she omitted, deciding certain, more salacious aspects were better kept hidden. Among Gaskell's best known novels are Cranford (1851–1853), North and South (1854–1855), and Wives and Daughters (1864–1866), all of which were adapted for television by the BBC.
The Brontës were a nineteenth-century literary family, born in the village of Thornton and later associated with the village of Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. The sisters, Charlotte (1816–1855), Emily (1818–1848) and Anne (1820–1849), are well-known poets and novelists. Like many contemporary female writers, they published their poems and novels under male pseudonyms: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Their stories attracted attention for their passion and originality immediately following their publication. Charlotte's Jane Eyre was the first to know success, while Emily's Wuthering Heights, Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and other works were accepted as masterpieces of literature after their deaths.
Michael Cunningham is an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. Cunningham is Professor in the Practice of Creative Writing at Yale University.
Ann Patchett 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. Patchett's other novels include The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), Taft (1994), The Magician's Assistant (1997), Run (2007), State of Wonder (2011), Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023). The Dutch House was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Lan Samantha Chang is an American novelist and short story writer. She is the author of The Family Chao (2022) and short story collection Hunger. For her fiction, which explores Chinese American experiences, she is a recipient of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Berlin Prize, the PEN/Open Book Award and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.
Aimee Phan is an American novelist and educator, of Vietnamese descent. She teaches at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, California.
Peter Orner is an American writer. He is the author of two novels, two story collections and a book of essays. Orner holds the Professorship of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and was formerly a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. He spent 2016 and 2017 on a Fulbright in Namibia teaching at the University of Namibia.
Joy Williams is an American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. Best-known for her short fiction, she is also the author of novels including State of Grace, The Quick and the Dead, and Harrow. Williams has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, a Rea Award for the Short Story, a Kirkus Award for Fiction, and a Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
Enid Shomer is an American poet and fiction writer. She is the author of five poetry collections, two short story collections and a novel. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Paris Review, The New Criterion, Parnassus, Kenyon Review, Tikkun, and in anthologies including The Best American Poetry. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, New Stories from the South, the Year's Best, Modern Maturity, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her stories, poems, and essays have been included in more than fifty anthologies and textbooks, including Poetry: A HarperCollins Pocket Anthology. Her book reviews and essays have appeared in The New Times Book Review, The Women's Review of Books, and elsewhere. Two of her books, Stars at Noon and Imaginary Men, were the subjects of feature interviews on NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Her writing is often set in or influenced by life in the State of Florida. Shomer was Poetry Series Editor for the University of Arkansas Press from 2002 to 2015, and has taught at many universities, including the University of Arkansas, Florida State University, and the Ohio State University, where she was the Thurber House Writer-in-Residence.
Gemma Bovery (ISBN 0-2240-6114-3) is a graphic novel by British writer and cartoonist Posy Simmonds. Originally published as a serial in The Guardian, it was published in book form in 1999. It is the tragicomic story of the life and death of an English expatriate in Normandy, drawing many parallels to Gustave Flaubert's 1857 novel Madame Bovary.
Hualing Nieh Engle, née Nieh Hua-ling, was a Chinese novelist, fiction writer, and poet. She was a professor emerita at the University of Iowa.
Margot Singer is an American short story writer and novelist. Her book The Pale of Settlement won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction in 2006 and her novel Underground Fugue was listed as "one of the most anticipated books by women in 2017" by Elle Magazine.
Amy M. Homes is an American writer best known for her controversial novels and unusual short stories, which feature extreme situations and characters. Notably, her novel The End of Alice (1996) is about a convicted child molester and murderer.
Margot Peters was an American novelist and biographer, including of Charlotte Brontë, George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the Drews and Barrymores, May Sarton, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. She was a recipient of the Ambassador Book Award.
Jane Eyre, the 1847 novel by English writer Charlotte Brontë, has frequently been adapted for film, radio, television, and theatre, and has also inspired a number of rewritings and reinterpretations.
Paula Jane Kiri Morris is a New Zealand novelist, short-story writer editor and literary academic. She is an associate professor at the University of Auckland and founder of the Academy of New Zealand Literature.
Diane Simmons is an American author. She won the Oregon Book Award in for her novel Dreams Like Thunder, and the Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction for Little America. She teaches English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York (CUNY). She published a biography of Caribbean author Jamaica Kincaid, which was based on her doctoral dissertation at the City University of New York.
Dorothy Helen Cornish was an English Montessori educator, suffragist, translator and writer. She was a co-creator and editor of the feminist gender studies journal Urania.
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