Suzanne Berne

Last updated
Suzanne Berne
Born (1961-01-17) January 17, 1961 (age 63)
Washington, D.C., U.S.
OccupationNovelist
NationalityAmerican
Education Georgetown Day School
Wesleyan University
Iowa Writers' Workshop
Notable works A Crime in the Neighborhood (1997)
Notable awards Orange Prize for Fiction (1999)

Suzanne Berne (born January 17, 1961, in Washington, D.C.) is an American novelist known for her foreboding character studies involving unexpected domestic and psychological drama in bucolic suburban settings. Berne's debut novel, A Crime in the Neighborhood , won the 1999 Orange Prize for Fiction. [1]

Contents

Life

Berne attended Georgetown Day School. She was educated at Wesleyan University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Berne has taught at both Harvard University and Wellesley College. [2] She is an associate English professor at Boston College. [3]

Berne currently lives in Boston with her husband and two daughters. [4]

Career

Berne's debut novel, A Crime in the Neighborhood , won the Orange Prize. [1] The novel, set in 1972, is told through the eyes of ten-year-old Marsha, and chronicles the murder of a young boy in a quiet suburb of Washington, D.C., against the backdrop of the unfolding Watergate scandal.

The Ghost at the Table explores the dramatic territory between two sisters' differing versions of their shared history.

A Perfect Arrangement tells of the complex and increasingly disturbing relationship between a normal suburban family and their exceptionally perfect nanny.

Works

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rita Dove</span> American poet and author (born 1952)

Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020, she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julia Alvarez</span> American poet, novelist, essayist

Julia Alvarez is an American New Formalist poet, novelist, and essayist. She rose to prominence with the novels How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), and Yo! (1997). Her publications as a poet include Homecoming (1984) and The Woman I Kept to Myself (2004), and as an essayist the autobiographical compilation Something to Declare (1998). She has achieved critical and commercial success on an international scale and many literary critics regard her to be one of the most significant contemporary Latina writers.

<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">Valerie Martin</span> American writer

Valerie Martin is an American novelist and short story writer.

<i>Gap Creek</i> 1999 American novel

Gap Creek is a novel by American writer Robert Morgan, and was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection in January 2000. The paperback version was published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill on August 21, 2012. Gap Creek is a sequel to Morgan's other novel, The Truest Pleasure. Gap Creek is a story about a strong young woman trying to make sense of the events in her life; death, marriage and parenthood don't dampen her spirits.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laila Lalami</span> Moroccan-American writer, and professor (born 1968)

Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her licence ès lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander Chee</span> American writer

Alexander Chee is an American fiction writer, poet, journalist and reviewer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tayari Jones</span> American writer (born 1970)

Tayari Jones is an American author and academic known for An American Marriage, which was a 2018 Oprah's Book Club Selection, and won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, the University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is currently a member of the English faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at Emory University, and recently returned to her hometown of Atlanta after a decade in New York City. Jones was Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-large at Cornell University before becoming Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.

Robert J. Sampson is the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor at Harvard University and Director of the Social Sciences Program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. From 2005 through 2010, Sampson served as the Chair of the Department of Sociology at Harvard. In 2011–2012, he was elected as the President of the American Society of Criminology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Parker (novelist)</span> American novelist

Michael Parker is an American short story writer, novelist and journalist.

<i>A Crime in the Neighborhood</i> 1997 novel by Suzanne Berne

A Crime in the Neighborhood is the debut novel by Suzanne Berne. It won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 1999. The story is told through the eyes of a ten-year-old girl, Marsha, and chronicles the murder of a young boy in a sleepy suburb of Washington, D.C. against the backdrop of the unfolding Watergate scandal in the spring and summer of 1972.

Robert Morgan is an American poet, short story writer, and novelist.

Melanie Sumner is an American writer and college professor. She was acclaimed as one of "America's Best Young Novelists" in 1995. Writer Jill McCorkle says, "She comes to her characters with this wealth of knowledge. She's so well-versed in those wonderful little details that make up Southern towns. She has such a rich expanse of her fictional turf wildly varied and yet always occupied with this kind of social manners and morals and taboos."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bill Roorbach</span> American novelist

William Roorbach is an American novelist, short story and nature writer, memoirist, journalist, blogger and critic. He has authored fiction and nonfiction works including Big Bend, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the O. Henry Prize. Roorbach's memoir in nature, Temple Stream, won the Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction, 2005. His novel, Life Among Giants, won the 2013 Maine Literary Award for Fiction.[18] And The Remedy for Love, also a novel, was one of six finalists for the 2014 Kirkus Fiction Prize.. His latest book, The Girl of the Lake, is a short story collection published in June 2017. His novel in progress is Lucky Turtle.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Manuel Muñoz (writer)</span> American novelist, short story writer, and professor

Manuel Muñoz is an American novelist, short story writer, and professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona.

A. J. Verdelle, is an American novelist who is published by Algonquin Books and Harper, with essays published by Crown, the Smithsonian, the Whitney Museum, Random House, and University of Georgia Press. Verdelle has forthcoming novels from Random House imprint Spiegel & Grau.

H.M. Naqvi is a Pakistani novelist who is the author of Home Boy, winner of the inaugural DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amy Stewart (writer)</span> American author

Amy N. Stewart is an American author best known for books on horticulture and the natural world.

Jayne Pupek was an American poet and fiction writer. She wrote and published two collections of poetry: The Livelihood of Crows and Forms of Intercession, and one novel, Tomato Girl, which was called a "wrenching, stunning, and pitch-perfect novel that captures the best of Southern literature's finest storytelling colors" by Library Journal and "an absorbing, unsettling debut" by Publishers Weekly. Writing for the Courier-Journal, critic L. Elisabeth Beattie notes: "Jayne Pupek's first novel puts her among the ranks of Southern masters like McCullers and O'Connor" Pupek's work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and has received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Tomato Girl was also published as an audio book by Recorded Books as part of their Southern Voices Audio Imprint.

Suzanne Marie Matson is an American fiction writer, poet and professor at Boston College.

References

  1. 1 2 "'Disturbing and lyrical' first novel wins Orange prize" . The Independent. 2011-10-22. Archived from the original on 2022-05-25. Retrieved 2021-09-27.
  2. "Suzanne Berne: Harvard Extension School". Archived from the original on 2009-12-14. Retrieved 2010-03-31.
  3. "English Department - Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences - Boston College". www.bc.edu.
  4. "Suzanne Berne |".