Mary Beth Keane


Mary Beth Keane is an American writer of Irish parentage. She is the author of The Walking People, Fever,and Ask Again, Yes. In 2011 she was named one of the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35," and in 2015 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction.

Personal Life

Born in the Bronx, New York City, and raised in Pearl River, New York with her sisters, Keane attended Immaculate Heart Academy in Washington Township, New Jersey.
Keane graduated from Barnard College, Columbia University, with a B.A. in English Literature in 1999. She later attended the University of Virginia, where she earned her M.F.A. in Fiction in 2005.
Raised a Catholic, she wrote an essay for Vogue Magazine in 2018, about her decision to leave the Catholic Church.
Keane lives outside New York City with her husband and their two sons, Owen and Emmett.

Career

In 2001 Keane was hired as a receptionist at a New York literary agency, where she met her agent.
Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Vogue, The Daily Beast, The Antioch Review, New York Stories, The Recorder, The Baltimore Review, and elsewhere.
Her Second Novel, "Fever", a fictional retelling of the life of Typhoid Mary, was listed as one of the New York Times Editor's Choice novels in March 2013.
Her third novel, Ask Again, Yes in June 2019 and in August 2019 she

Influences

Keane has named William Trevor, Seamus Heaney, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood and Elizabeth Strout among authors who have influenced her writing. She has said her Irish heritage influences the characters she chooses to write.

Awards

"Ask Again, Yes" was selected as The Tonight Show Summer Reads choice for 2019 after five days of audience voting that garnered nearly a million votes,, was the winner of the NAIBA 2019 Award for Best Fiction and was nominated for the 2019 Goodread's Choice Award Best Fiction.

Works