Ann Patchett

Patchett was born in Los Angeles, California. She was the younger of two daughters of Frank Patchett, a Los Angeles police captain and Jeanne Ray, a nurse (who later became a novelist). The couple divorced 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. It was there that she wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars.

In 2010, she co-founded the bookstore Parnassus Books with Karen Hayes; the store opened in November 2011. In 2016, Parnassus Books branched out with a mobile bookmobile, piggybacking on success of food trucks, and expanding 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 at the Miami Book Fair International 2014

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.

For specific works

• Nashville Banner Tennessee Writer of the Year Award, 1994.
• Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize (Taft), 1994.
• National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (Bel Canto), 2001.
• PEN/Faulkner Award (Bel Canto), 2002.
• Orange Prize (Bel Canto), 2002.
• BookSense Book of the Year (Bel Canto).
• Wellcome Trust Book Prize shortlist (State of Wonder), 2011.

For corpus

• Guggenheim Fellowship, 1995 (mid-career).
• Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award (body of work), 2014.
• 2014 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement

Novels

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Nonfiction

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