Anthony Doerr

Last updated

Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr (2015).jpg
Doerr in July 2015
Born Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.
OccupationNovelist
Education Bowdoin College (AB)
Bowling Green State University (MFA)
Website
www.anthonydoerr.com

Anthony Doerr is an American author of novels and short stories. He gained widespread recognition for his 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See , which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Contents

Early life and education

Raised in Cleveland, Ohio, [1] Doerr attended the nearby University School, graduating in 1991. He then majored in history at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, graduating in 1995. He earned an MFA from Bowling Green State University. [2]

Career

Doerr's first book was a collection of short stories called The Shell Collector (2002). Many of the stories take place in countries within Africa and New Zealand, where he has worked and lived. His first novel, About Grace, was released in 2004. His memoir, Four Seasons in Rome, was published in 2007, and his second collection of short stories, Memory Wall, was published in 2010.

Doerr's second novel, All the Light We Cannot See , is set in occupied France during World War II and was published in 2014. It received significant critical acclaim and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. [3] The book was a New York Times bestseller, and was named by the newspaper as a notable book of 2014. [4] It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2015. It was runner-up for the 2015 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction [5] and won the 2015 Ohioana Library Association Book Award for Fiction. [6]

Doerr writes a column on science books for The Boston Globe and is a contributor to The Morning News , an online magazine.

From 2007 to 2010, he was the Writer in Residence for the state of Idaho. [7] [8]

Doerr's third novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land , follows three story lines, scattered throughout time: 13-year-old Anna and Omeir, an orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy, on opposite sides of formidable city walls during the 1453 siege of Constantinople; teenage idealist Seymour and octogenarian Zeno in an attack on a public library in present-day Idaho; and Konstance, decades from now, who turns to the oldest stories to guide her community in peril. [9] Cloud Cuckoo Land was released September 28, 2021. It was shortlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction. [10]

Personal life

Doerr is married, has twin sons, and lives in Boise, Idaho. [11]

Bibliography

Novels

Short fiction

Collections
Anthologies edited

Memoirs

Essays and reporting

Critical studies and reviews of Doerr's work

Cloud cuckoo land

———————

Notes
  1. Online version is titled "Anthony Doerr's optimism engine".

Awards

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louise Erdrich</span> American author (born 1954)

Karen Louise Erdrich is an American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pulitzer Prize for Fiction</span> American award for distinguished novels

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes that are annually awarded for Letters, Drama, and Music. It recognizes distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life, published during the preceding calendar year.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jhumpa Lahiri</span> American author

Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri is a British-American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Ford</span> American author

Richard Ford is an American novelist and short story author, and writer of a series of novels featuring the character Frank Bascombe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Annie Proulx</span> American novelist, short story and non-fiction author (born 1935)

Edna Ann Proulx is an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. She has written most frequently as Annie Proulx but has also used the names E. Annie Proulx and E.A. Proulx.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jane Smiley</span> American novelist (born 1949)

Jane Smiley is an American novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres (1991).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Conrad Richter</span> American novelist

Conrad Michael Richter was an American novelist whose lyrical work is concerned largely with life on the American frontier in various periods. His novel The Town (1950), the last story of his trilogy The Awakening Land about the Ohio frontier, won the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His novel The Waters of Kronos won the 1961 National Book Award for Fiction. Two collections of short stories were published posthumously during the 20th century, and several of his novels have been reissued during the 21st century by academic presses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Berger (novelist)</span> American writer (1924–2014)

Thomas Louis Berger was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Denis Johnson</span> American novelist and poet (1949–2017)

Denis Hale Johnson was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet. He is perhaps best known for his debut short story collection, Jesus' Son (1992). His most successful novel, Tree of Smoke (2007), won the National Book Award for Fiction. Johnson was twice shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Altogether, Johnson was the author of nine novels, one novella, two books of short stories, three collections of poetry, two collections of plays, and one book of reportage. His final work, a book of short stories titled The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, was published posthumously in 2018.

Cloud cuckoo land is a state of absurdly, over-optimistic fantasy or an unrealistically idealistic state of mind where everything appears to be perfect. Someone who is said to "live in cloud cuckoo land" is a person who thinks that things that are completely impossible might happen, rather than understanding how things really are. It also hints that the person referred to is naive, unaware of realities or deranged in holding such an optimistic belief.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Sean Greer</span> American novelist and short story writer (born 1970)

Andrew Sean Greer is an American novelist and short story writer. Greer received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel Less. He is the author of The Story of a Marriage, which The New York Times has called an "inspired, lyrical novel", and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named one of the best books of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and received a California Book Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">H. L. Davis</span> American novelist

Harold Lenoir Davis, also known as H. L. Davis, was an American novelist and poet. A native of Oregon, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Honey in the Horn, the only Pulitzer Prize for Literature given to a native Oregonian. Later living in California and Texas, he also wrote short stories for magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post.

The Story Prize is an annual book award established in 2004 that honors the author of an outstanding collection of short fiction with a $20,000 cash award. Each of two runners-up receives $5,000. Eligible books must be written in English and first published in the United States during a calendar year. The founder of the prize is Julie Lindsey, and the director is Larry Dark. He was previously series editor for the annual short story anthology Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards from 1997 to 2002.

The Morning News is a U.S.-based daily online magazine founded in 1999 by Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack. It began as an email newsletter and in the fall of 2000 evolved into a news-oriented weblog with a New York focus. In October 2002, Baldwin and Womack launched The Morning News as a daily-published online magazine.

Salvatore Scibona is an American novelist. He has won awards for both his novels and short stories, and was selected in 2010 as one of The New Yorker's "20 under 40" Fiction Writers to Watch. His work has been published in ten languages. In 2021 he was awarded the $200,000 Mildred and Harold Strauss Living award from the American Academy of Arts and Letter for his novel The Volunteer. In its citation the Academy wrote, "Salvatore Scibona’s work is grand, tragic, epic. His novel The Volunteer, about war, masculinity, abandonment, and grimly executed grace, is an intricate masterpiece of plot, scene, and troubled character. In language both meticulous and extravagant, Scibona brings to the American novel a mythic fury, a fresh greatness."

<i>Train Dreams</i> 2011 novella by Denis Johnson

Train Dreams is a novella by Denis Johnson. It was published on August 30, 2011, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It was originally published, in slightly different form, in the Summer 2002 issue of The Paris Review.

<i>All the Light We Cannot See</i> 2014 novel by Anthony Doerr

All the Light We Cannot See is a 2014 war novel by American author Anthony Doerr. The novel is set during World War II. It revolves around the characters Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind French girl who takes refuge in her great-uncle's house in Saint-Malo after Paris is invaded by Nazi Germany, and Werner Pfennig, a bright German boy who is accepted into a military school because of his skills in radio technology. The book alternates between paralleling chapters depicting Marie-Laure and Werner, framed with a nonlinear structure. The novel has a lyrical writing style, with critics noting extensive sensory details. The story has ethical themes, portraying the destructive nature of war and Doerr's fascination with science and nature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Idaho Comics Group</span> American independent comic book publishing company

Idaho Comics Group (ICG) is an independent comic book publishing company from Boise, Idaho, that was founded in 2014 by Albert Frank Asker. ICG publishes two comics anthologies: the officially licensed Tarzan and the Comics of Idaho and Idaho Comics. The anthologies bring attention to comic book writers and artists from the state of Idaho; sales from the comics benefit the Boise Public Library.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emily Ruskovich</span> American writer

Emily Ruskovich is an American writer who won the 2019 International Dublin literary award for her novel Idaho. She grew up in the Idaho Panhandle on Hoodoo Mountain. She graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2011 and is an assistant professor at the University of Montana where she teaches creative writing; she was formerly on the faculty of Boise State University. She lives in the mountains west of Missoula.

<i>Cloud Cuckoo Land</i> (novel) 2021 novel by Anthony Doerr

Cloud Cuckoo Land is a 2021 historical and speculative fiction novel by Pulitzer-prize winning author Anthony Doerr. It was first published on September 28, 2021, in the United States by Charles Scribner's Sons and the United Kingdom by Fourth Estate. The novel centers around an Ancient Greek codex that links characters from fifteenth-century Constantinople, present-day Idaho, and a twenty-second-century starship.

References

  1. Long, Karen R. (April 10, 2011). "Anthony Doerr Wins Lucrative Short-story Prize". The Plain Dealer. Retrieved April 27, 2011.
  2. "Anthony Doerr". Archived from the original on May 9, 2010.
  3. "Get To Know The Finalists For The 2014 National Book Award". NPR.org. Retrieved November 6, 2020.
  4. "The 10 Best Books of 2014". The New York Times . December 4, 2014.
  5. D. Verne Morland. "Dayton Literary Peace Prize - An International Award".
  6. "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on September 5, 2015. Retrieved December 2, 2015.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  7. "ICA". Archived from the original on May 12, 2012.
  8. "Anthony Doerr Is A Recognized (And Slightly Wealthier) Fellow". Boise Weekly. Archived from the original on March 10, 2012. Retrieved April 29, 2010.
  9. "HarperCollins is delighted to announce the publication of Antony Doerr's new novel 'CLOUD CUCKOO LAND'" (Press release).
  10. "National Book Awards 2021 shortlists announced". Books+Publishing. October 6, 2021. Archived from the original on October 6, 2021. Retrieved October 10, 2021.
  11. Oland, Dana (April 20, 2015). "Boise's Anthony Doerr wins the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction". Idaho Statesman. Retrieved September 29, 2017.
  12. Staff writer (April 8, 2011). "Anthony Doerr wins Short Story award". BBC News. Retrieved January 22, 2013.
  13. Staff writer (April 9, 2011). "A heartwarming win for a heartbreaking tale". The Sunday Times . Archived from the original on May 9, 2012. Retrieved January 22, 2013.