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.^[1][2] Patchett's other novels include The Patron Saint of Liars (1992),^[3] Taft (1994),^[4] The Magician's Assistant (1997), Run (2007),^[5] State of Wonder (2011), Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023).^[6] The Dutch House was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.^[7]

Ann Patchett
Patchett speaks during the Kennedy Center Honors, 2023
Born	(1963-12-02) December 2, 1963 (age 61) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist, memoirist
Education	Sarah Lawrence College (BA) University of Iowa (MFA)
Period	1992–present
Genre	Literary fiction
Notable works	Bel Canto
Website
annpatchett.com

Biography

Ann Patchett was born on December 2, 1963, in Los Angeles, California, to Frank Patchett (a Los Angeles police captain who arrested Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan^[8]) and Jeanne Ray (a nurse who later became a novelist).^[9] 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, Tennessee.^[10] She has described her stepfather as a "very, very weird guy" who had her carrying 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.^[11]

Patchett attended St. Bernard Academy, a private Catholic school for girls in Nashville, Tennessee run by the Sisters of Mercy.^[3][4] Following graduation, she attended Sarah Lawrence College.^[12][4]

After college, she 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.^[13]

In her late twenties, Patchett won a fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts;^[3] during her time there, she wrote her first novel The Patron Saint of Liars, which was published in 1992.^[3][9]

In 2010, she co-founded a bookstore with Karen Hayes, Parnassus Books, in Nashville, Tennessee, which opened in November 2011.^[14] In 2016, Parnassus Books expanded, adding a bookmobile to expand the reach of the bookstore in Nashville.^[15]

Patchett lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband, Karl VanDevender.^[16] It is Patchett’s second marriage.^[17]

Writing

Patchett at the Miami Book Fair International 2014

Patchett's first published work was in The Paris Review, a story that appeared before she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College.^[9]

For nine years, Patchett worked at Seventeen magazine,^[3] 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!"^[3]

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.^[12] In 1992, Patchett published The Patron Saint of Liars.^[4] The novel was made into a television movie of the same title in 1998.^[18] Her second novel Taft won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in fiction in 1994.^[4] Her third novel, The Magician’s Assistant, was released in 1997.^[19] In 2001, her fourth novel Bel Canto was her breakthrough, becoming a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist,^[20] and winning the PEN/Faulkner Award.^[1]

A friend of writer Lucy Grealy, Patchett has written a memoir about their relationship, Truth & Beauty: A Friendship. Patchett's novel, Run,^[5] 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.^[21] In 2011, she published State of Wonder, a novel set in the Amazon jungle, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.^[2][22] In 2016 she published her novel Commonwealth to widespread critical acclaim. Patchett called the book her "autobiographical first novel," explaining, “The wonderful thing about publishing this book at 52 is that I know that I am [already] capable of working from a place of deep imagination.”^[23]

In 2019, Patchett published her first children's book, Lambslide,^[24] and the novel The Dutch House,^[25] a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.^[26]

In November 2021, she published These Precious Days, an essay collection she describes as the sequel to This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. These Precious Days received wide acclaim, with review aggregator Book Marks rating it a “rave” based on 25 reviews.^[27] In 2023, Ann Patchett published a novel called Tom Lake, and it was ranked a The New York Times Best Sellers.^[28]

In 2024, in an interview for the BBC, when asked her thoughts on encouraging people to slow down and sit with issues longer, she responded:^[29]

Wouldn't it be lovely if people sat quietly for longer periods of time? And I do, because I write novels for a living. And I'm very, very careful with myself because I don't want anything to disrupt my ability to concentrate on one thing for long periods of time. To that end, I do not watch television under any circumstances, I do not have a cell phone, and I participate in no form of social media. I have never looked at Facebook. That's kind of interesting, because my bookstore has a huge social media presence and I make videos about the books that I'm reading, but I never watch them.

Her work has been translated into more than 30 languages.^[30]

Awards and honors

For specific works

• Nashville Banner Tennessee Writer of the Year Award, 1994.^[31]
• Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize (Taft), 1994.^[4]
• National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (Bel Canto), 2001.^[20]
• PEN/Faulkner Award (Bel Canto), 2002.^[1]
• Orange Prize (Bel Canto), 2002.^[2][32]
• BookSense Book of the Year (Bel Canto), 2003.^[33]
• Wellcome Trust Book Prize shortlist (State of Wonder), 2011.^[34]

For corpus

• Guggenheim Fellowship, 1995 (mid-career).^[35]
• In 2012, Patchett was recognized on the Time 100 list as one of the most influential people in the world by Time magazine.^[36]
• Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award (body of work), 2014.^[37]
• 2014 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement^[38]
• American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2017^[39]
• Carl Sandburg Literary Award from Chicago Public Library Foundation, 2024^[40][41]

Published works

Novels

• — (1992). The Patron Saint of Liars. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 039561306X. OCLC 24796726.
• — (1994). Taft. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 9780395694619. Retrieved 14 September 2016. Reprinted in the following year, see Taft. New York, NY: Random House. 1995. ISBN 0804113882. Retrieved 14 September 2016.
• — (1997). The Magician's Assistant. New York: Harcourt Brace. ISBN 9780151002634. OCLC 36225079.
• — (2001). Bel Canto. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 9780060188733. OCLC 45466121.
• — (2007). Run. New York: HarperLuxe. ISBN 9780061363931. OCLC 173640797.
• — (2011). State of Wonder. New York: Harper. ISBN 978-0062049803. OCLC 649701863.
• — (2016). Commonwealth. New York, NY: Harper. ISBN 9780062491794. OCLC 932576291.
• — (2019). The Dutch House. New York, NY: Harper. ISBN 9780062963673.
• — (2023). Tom Lake. New York, NY: Harper. ISBN 9780063327528.

Nonfiction

• — (2004). Truth & Beauty: A Friendship. New York: Harper Collins. ISBN 0060572140. OCLC 53932670.
• — (2008). What Now?. New York: Harper. ISBN 9780061340659. OCLC 179806486.
• — (2011). The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life. Byliner, Incorporated. ISBN 9781614520665.^[42]
• — (2013). This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. New York, NY: Harper. ISBN 9780062236678. OCLC 857776359.
• — (2021). These Precious Days: Essays. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-309278-5.