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 novelBel Canto. Patchett's other novels include The Patron Saint of Liars, Taft, The Magician's Assistant, Run, State of Wonder, Commonwealth, and The Dutch House. The Dutch House was a finalist for the 2020Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Biography
Patchett was born in Los Angeles, California, to Frank Patchett, a Los Angeles police captain, and Jeanne Ray, a nurse who later became a novelist. She is the younger of two daughters. Frank and Jeanne divorced when she was young, and her mother remarried, moving the family to Nashville, Tennessee when Patchett was six years old. Patchett attended St. Bernard Academy, a private Catholic school for girls in Nashville, Tennessee run by the Sisters of Mercy. Following graduation, she attended Sarah Lawrence College. She later attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she wrote her first novel The Patron Saint of Liars. In 2010, she co-founded the bookstore Parnassus Books with Karen Hayes and it opened in November 2011. In 2016, Parnassus Books expanded, adding a bookmobile to piggyback on the success of food trucks and expand the reach of the bookstore in Nashville. In 2012, Patchett was on the Time 100 list of most influential people in the world by TIME magazine. Patchett currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband, Karl VanDevender.
Writing
Patchett's first published work was in The Paris Review, where she published a story before she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College. For nine years, Patchett worked at Seventeen magazine, where she wrote primarily non-fiction and the magazine 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 York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, O, The Oprah Magazine, ELLE, GQ, Gourmet, and Vogue. In 1992, Patchett 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, her fourth novel Bel Canto was her breakthrough, becoming a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and winning the PEN/Faulkner Award. A friend of writer Lucy Grealy, Patchett 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 is the editor of the 2006 volume of the anthology series The Best American Short Stories. In 2011, she published State of Wonder, a novel set in the Amazon jungle, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. In 2019, Patchett published her first children's book, Lambslide, and the novelThe Dutch House.
Awards and honors
For specific works
Nashville Banner Tennessee Writer of the Year Award, 1994.
