Her 2002 novel, Bel Canto, was a favorite of critics and book groups around the nation and propelled well-established author Ann Patchett into the national spotlight. Bel Canto won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It sold well over a million copies and has been translated into thirty languages.

Ann Patchett was born in Los Angeles and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, where she still resides. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 1990, she won a residential fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, which was named a New York Times Notable Book for 1992.

Her second novel, Taft, was also highly regarded and won the Kafka Prize as the best work of fiction for 1994. The Magician’s Assistant (1997), Patchett’s third novel, was short-listed for England’s coveted Orange Prize. Its publication also brought her a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In 2004, Patchett published Truth and Beauty, a memoir of her friendship with the late Lucy Grealy, author of Autobiography of a Face. It was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Entertainment Weekly.

Described by Publishers Weekly as “a book that sets out inventively to contend with the temper of our times,” her fifth and most recent novel, Run (2007), received rave reviews and became a New York Times bestseller. Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post said Run “is engaging, surprising, provocative and moving…I quite reluctantly reached the final page.”

In addition to her full-length works, Ann Patchett has written for numerous publications including The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Gourmet and Vogue.

She is a member of the board of the Nashville Public Library Foundation.

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