Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett (born December 2, 1963) 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.

Biography

Ann Patchett was born on December 2, 1963 in Los Angeles, to Frank Patchett (a Los Angeles police captain who arrested Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan) and Jeanne Ray (a nurse who later became a novelist). She is the younger of two daughters. Her mother and father divorced when she was young. Her mother remarried and when Patchett was six years old the family moved to Nashville. She has described her stepfather as a "very, very weird guy" who had her carry a gun as early as age sixteen, and she attributes her disinterest in texting to his forcing her mother to carry a pager and respond to him on demand.

Patchett attended St. Bernard Academy, a private Catholic school for girls in Nashville run by the Sisters of Mercy. After graduation, she attended Sarah Lawrence Collegein Yonkers, New York.

After college, Ann Patchett attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she lived with the memoirist and poet Lucy Grealy. Their time as roommates and their life-long friendship was the subject of her 2004 memoir '' Truth & Beauty''. In her early twenties Patchett married; however, the marriage lasted only about a year.

In her late twenties, Patchett won a fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts; during her time there, she wrote her first novel ''The Patron Saint of Liars'', which was published in 1992. In 2010, she co-founded the bookstore Parnassus Books with Karen Hayes, in Nashville. It opened in November 2011. In 2016, Parnassus Books expanded, adding a bookmobile expanding the reach of the bookstore in Nashville. Patchett lives in Nashville with her husband, Karl VanDevender.

Writing

Patchett's first published work was in ''The Paris Review'', a story which appeared before she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College. For nine years, Patchett worked at '' Seventeen'' magazine, where she wrote primarily non-fiction. The magazine only published one of every five articles she wrote. She ended her relationship with the magazine after getting into a dispute with an editor and exclaiming, "I’ll never darken your door again!"

Patchett has written for numerous publications including ''The New Yorker'', ''The New York Times Magazine'', ''The Washington Post'', ''O, The Oprah Magazine'', ''ELLE'', '' GQ'', ''Gourmet'', and '' Vogue''.
In 1992, she published '' The Patron Saint of Liars''. The novel was made into a television 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, she achieved a breakthrough with her fourth novel ''Bel Canto'', becoming a National Book Critics Circle Award