Novels may take her far afield, she has observed, but her essays tend to come from her own life and are “made from the things that were at hand.”īorn in 1963, in Los Angeles, and raised in Nashville, Patchett describes herself as being a child who possessed a knack for “stillness” and being alone with her own thoughts, valuable skills for a writer. In addition to her novels, Patchett has published two children’s books and four works of nonfiction, including her most recent collection of essays, These Precious Days. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which recognizes prose for the “quality of its style.” Patchett has received, among other honors, the Pen/Faulkner Award, United Kingdom’s Orange Prize for Fiction, and the Harold D. Her fiction has proven to be compelling to readers and critics alike.

“That’s it.” This deceptively simple premise has allowed her to delve into the complexities of her characters’ inner lives and deliver what one reviewer described as “provocative insights that sum up entire relationships.” For Patchett, however, the connection between her stories is simple: “A group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society,” Patchett said in a recent telephone conversation. In Commonwealth, a messy, blended family mourns the tragic loss of a child. In State of Wonder, a scientist sets off into the Brazilian rain forest to locate the body of her deceased colleague. In The Patron Saint of Liars, a woman with a secret arrives at a home for unwed mothers. When the plots of Ann Patchett’s eight novels are summarized, they may seem, at first, to have nothing in common.

With her best-selling novels and essays, and her bookstore, readers from around the world see themselves in the pages of Ann Patchett’s books that take people to places of the heart and feed the imagination of our Nation.

Ann Patchett, for putting into words the beauty, pain, and complexity of human nature.

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