Judith Thurman is an American writer, biographer, and critic. She is the recipient of the 1983 National Book Award for nonfiction for her biography Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller. Her book Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette was a finalist for the 1999 nonfiction National Book Award. In 2016, she received the medal of Chevalier of the Order Of Arts And Letters. She is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine.
Biography and work by year
Thurman was born on October 28, 1946 in New York City. In 1967, Thurman graduated from Brandeis University with a Bachelor of Arts for her post-secondary education. She began her literary career as a poet. The Covent Garden Press, in London, published her first book of poems, Putting My Coat On, in 1971. In the 1970s, Atheneum, in New York, published I Became Alone, a book of essays on women poets, for young people, and a volume of poetry for children, Flashlight, which has been regularly anthologized for more than forty years. In 1973, Thurman, moved back to New York after five years in Europe, and began to contribute to the newly launched Ms. Magazine. Her essays introduced relatively unknown great women writers to a new audience. They included the French poet Louise Labé and the Mexican poet Juana Inés de la Cruz. Thurman's translations of their work appeared in the Penguin Book of Women Poets. She also wrote about Gertrude Stein, Jean Rhys, Caryl Churchill, and Isak Dinesen, among others. Thurman worked at Brooklyn College as an adjunct professor from 1973 to 1975. For the remainder of the 1970s, Thurman had three publications while writing a biography on Isak Dinesen. In the mid 1970s, Thurman began her Dinesen biography after being convinced by a representative from St. Martin's Press. During her eight year writing process, Thurman stopped writing her biography after experiencing writer's block and anxiety. After resuming her writing, Thurman's biography, Isak Dinesen: The Life of A Storyteller, was published by St. Martin's Press in 1982. It won the National Book Award for nonfiction, in 1983, and served as the basis for Sydney Pollack's Academy Award-winning film, Out of Africa, on which Thurman served as an Associate Producer. In 1987, Thurman began contributing to The New Yorker. She took a leave to write a biography titled "Colette: Secrets of the Flesh", which was published by Knopf in 1999. It won the Los Angeles Times and Salon Book Awards for Biography. In 2000, she returned to The New Yorker as a Staff Writer, where she has specialized in cultural criticism for the last twenty years. A collection of her essays for the magazine, Cleopatra's Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire, was published by FSG in 2007, and was a New York Times Best Book of the Year. Thurman is a recipient of the Harold G. Vursell Award for prose style, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, from the French government; and the Rungstedlund Prize, from the Royal Danish Academy.
