Ann Patchett
Encyclopedia
Ann Patchett is an American
author. She received the Orange Prize for Fiction
and the PEN/Faulkner Award
in 2002 for her novel
Bel Canto
. Patchett's other novels include Run
, The Patron Saint of Liars, Taft, and The Magician's Assistant, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship
and received the Nashville Banner
Tennessee Writer of the Year Award in 1994.
. Her mother is the novelist Jeanne Ray.
She moved to Nashville, Tennessee
when she was six, where she continues to live. In 2010, Patchett said she loves her home in Nashville with her doctor husband and dog. If asked if she could go any place, that place will always be home. 'Home is ...the stable window that opens out into the imagination.'
Patchett attended high school at St. Bernard Academy, a private, non-parochial Catholic school for girls run by the Sisters of Mercy. Following graduation, she attended Sarah Lawrence College
and took fiction writing classes with Allan Gurganus
, Russell Banks
, and Grace Paley
. She later attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop
at the University of Iowa
and the Fine Arts Work Center
in Provincetown, Massachusetts
, where she met longtime friend Elizabeth McCracken
. It was also there that she wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars.
For nine years, Patchett worked at Seventeen
magazine. She mostly wrote non-fiction
, and the magazine would publish only one of every five articles she wrote. She said that the magazine was cruel and eventually she stopped taking criticism personally. She ended her relationship with the magazine after getting into a fight with an editor and exclaiming, "I’ll never darken your door again!"
In 1992, Patchett published The Patron Saint of Liars. The novel was made into a movie of the same title in 1998.
Her second novel Taft won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in fiction in 1994. Her third novel, The Magician’s Assistant, was released in 1997. In 2001, her fourth novel Bel Canto
became her breakthrough, winning many awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, and becoming a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist.
She was friends with fellow writer Lucy Grealy
and has written a memoir about their relationship, Truth and Beauty: A Friendship. Patchett's novel, Run, was released in October 2007. What now?, published in April 2008, is an essay based on a commencement speech she delivered at her alma mater in 2006.
Patchett has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazine
, The Washington Post
, O, The Oprah Magazine
, ELLE
, GQ
, Gourmet
, and Vogue
. She is the editor of the 2006 volume of the anthology series The Best American Short Stories
.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
author. She received the Orange Prize for Fiction
Orange Prize for Fiction
The Orange Prize for Fiction is one of the United Kingdom's most prestigious literary prizes, annually awarded to a female author of any nationality for the best original full-length novel written in English, and published in the United Kingdom in the preceding year...
and the PEN/Faulkner Award
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction is awarded annually by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation to the authors of the year's best works of fiction by living American citizens. The winner receives US $15,000 and each of four runners-up receives US $5000. The foundation brings the winner and runners-up to...
in 2002 for her novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
Bel Canto
Bel Canto (novel)
Bel Canto is a 2001 novel by American author Ann Patchett, published by Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. It was awarded both the Orange Prize for Fiction and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction...
. Patchett's other novels include Run
Run (novel)
Run is a 2007 novel by American author Ann Patchett. It is her first novel to be published since her widely successful Bel Canto .-Plot summary:...
, The Patron Saint of Liars, Taft, and The Magician's Assistant, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
and received the Nashville Banner
Nashville Banner
The Nashville Banner is a defunct daily newspaper of Nashville, Tennessee, United States, which published from April 10, 1876 until February 20, 1998...
Tennessee Writer of the Year Award in 1994.
Biography
Patchett was born in Los Angeles, CaliforniaLos Angeles, California
Los Angeles , with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in California, USA and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of , and is located in Southern California...
. Her mother is the novelist Jeanne Ray.
She moved to Nashville, Tennessee
Nashville, Tennessee
Nashville is the capital of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the county seat of Davidson County. It is located on the Cumberland River in Davidson County, in the north-central part of the state. The city is a center for the health care, publishing, banking and transportation industries, and is home...
when she was six, where she continues to live. In 2010, Patchett said she loves her home in Nashville with her doctor husband and dog. If asked if she could go any place, that place will always be home. 'Home is ...the stable window that opens out into the imagination.'
Patchett attended high school at St. Bernard Academy, a private, non-parochial Catholic school for girls run by the Sisters of Mercy. Following graduation, she attended Sarah Lawrence College
Sarah Lawrence College
Sarah Lawrence College is a private liberal arts college in the United States, and a leader in progressive education since its founding in 1926. Located just 30 minutes north of Midtown Manhattan in southern Westchester County, New York, in the city of Yonkers, this coeducational college offers...
and took fiction writing classes with Allan Gurganus
Allan Gurganus
Allan Gurganus is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose work is often influenced by and set in his native North Carolina. His writing has been compared to the work of William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, who also were identified with the American South.-Biography: Gurganus was...
, Russell Banks
Russell Banks
Russell Banks is an American writer of fiction and poetry.- Biography :Russell Banks was born in Newton, Massachusetts on March 28, 1940. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in upstate New York, and has been named a New York State Author. He is also...
, and Grace Paley
Grace Paley
Grace Paley was an American-Jewish short story writer, poet, and political activist.-Biography:Grace Paley was born in the Bronx to Isaac and Manya Ridnyik Goodside, who anglicized the family name from Gutseit on immigrating from Ukraine. Her father was a doctor. The family spoke Russian and...
. She later attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop
Iowa Writers' Workshop
The Program in Creative Writing, more commonly known as the Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, is a highly regarded graduate-level creative writing program in the United States...
at the University of Iowa
University of Iowa
The University of Iowa is a public state-supported research university located in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. It is the oldest public university in the state. The university is organized into eleven colleges granting undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees...
and the Fine Arts Work Center
Fine Arts Work Center
The Fine Arts Work Center is a non-profit enterprise devoted to encouraging the growth and development of emerging visual artists and writers through residency programs, to the propagation of aesthetic values and experience, and to the restoration of the year-round vitality of the historic art...
in Provincetown, Massachusetts
Provincetown, Massachusetts
Provincetown is a New England town located at the extreme tip of Cape Cod in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 3,431 at the 2000 census, with an estimated 2007 population of 3,174...
, where she met longtime friend Elizabeth McCracken
Elizabeth McCracken
Elizabeth McCracken is an American author.McCracken, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, graduated from Newton North High School in Newton, Massachusetts, earned a B.A. and M.A. in English from Boston University, an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, and...
. It was also there that she wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars.
Published work
Patchett's first published work was in The Paris Review. She sold her story to the journal and had it published before she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College.For nine years, Patchett worked at Seventeen
Seventeen (magazine)
Seventeen is an American magazine for teenagers. It was first published in September 1944 by Walter Annenberg's Triangle Publications. News Corporation bought Triangle in 1988, and sold Seventeen to K-III Communications in 1991. Primedia sold the magazine to Hearst in 2003. It is still in the...
magazine. She mostly wrote non-fiction
Non-fiction
Non-fiction is the form of any narrative, account, or other communicative work whose assertions and descriptions are understood to be fact...
, and the magazine would publish only one of every five articles she wrote. She said that the magazine was cruel and eventually she stopped taking criticism personally. She ended her relationship with the magazine after getting into a fight with an editor and exclaiming, "I’ll never darken your door again!"
In 1992, Patchett published The Patron Saint of Liars. The novel was made into a movie of the same title in 1998.
Her second novel Taft won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in fiction in 1994. Her third novel, The Magician’s Assistant, was released in 1997. In 2001, her fourth novel Bel Canto
Bel Canto (novel)
Bel Canto is a 2001 novel by American author Ann Patchett, published by Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. It was awarded both the Orange Prize for Fiction and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction...
became her breakthrough, winning many awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, and becoming a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist.
She was friends with fellow writer Lucy Grealy
Lucy Grealy
Lucinda Margaret Grealy was an American poet and memoirist who wrote Autobiography of a Face in 1994. This critically acclaimed book describes her childhood and early adolescence experience with cancer of the jaw, which left her with some facial disfigurement...
and has written a memoir about their relationship, Truth and Beauty: A Friendship. Patchett's novel, Run, was released in October 2007. What now?, published in April 2008, is an essay based on a commencement speech she delivered at her alma mater in 2006.
Patchett has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazine
The New York Times Magazine
The New York Times Magazine is a Sunday magazine supplement included with the Sunday edition of The New York Times. It is host to feature articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted many notable contributors...
, The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...
, O, The Oprah Magazine
O, The Oprah Magazine
O: The Oprah Magazine, sometimes simply abbreviated to O, is a monthly magazine founded by Oprah Winfrey and Hearst Corporation.-Overview:...
, ELLE
Elle
Elle may refer to:*Elle, Central African Republic*Elle , a fashion publication*Ellé, a river in France*Elle , a female given name*Elle , a Sri Lankan game similar to baseball*Ælle of Sussex, a Saxon king...
, GQ
GQ (magazine)
GQ is a monthly men's magazine focusing on fashion, style, and culture for men, through articles on food, movies, fitness, sex, music, travel, sports, technology, and books...
, Gourmet
Gourmet (magazine)
Gourmet magazine was a monthly publication of Condé Nast and the first U.S. magazine devoted to food and wine. Founded by Earle R. MacAusland and first published in 1941, Gourmet also covered "good living" on a wider scale....
, and Vogue
Vogue (magazine)
Vogue is a fashion and lifestyle magazine that is published monthly in 18 national and one regional edition by Condé Nast.-History:In 1892 Arthur Turnure founded Vogue as a weekly publication in the United States. When he died in 1909, Condé Montrose Nast picked up the magazine and slowly began...
. She is the editor of the 2006 volume of the anthology series The Best American Short Stories
Best American Short Stories
The Best American Short Stories yearly anthology is a part of The Best American Series published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Since 1915, the BASS anthology has striven to contain the best short stories by some of the best-known writers in contemporary American literature.-Edward O'Brien:The...
.
Novels
- The Patron Saint of LiarsThe Patron Saint of LiarsThe Patron Saint of Liars is an 1998 drama television film based on a novel by Ann Patchett and starring Dana Delany, Ellen Burstyn and Clancy Brown...
(1992) - Taft (1994)
- The Magician's Assistant (1997)
- Bel CantoBel Canto (novel)Bel Canto is a 2001 novel by American author Ann Patchett, published by Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. It was awarded both the Orange Prize for Fiction and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction...
(2001) - Run (2007)
- State of Wonder (2011)