Anita Shreve

BIO

Anita Shreve grew up in Dedham, Massachusetts (just outside
Boston), the eldest of three daughters. Early literary influences
include having read Ethan Frome by
Edith Wharton when she was a junior in high school (a short novel
she still claims as one of her favorites) and everything Eugene
O'Neill ever wrote while she was a senior (to which she attributes
a somewhat dark streak in her own work). After graduating from
Tufts University, she taught high school for a number of years in
and around Boston. In the middle of her last year, she quit
(something that, as a parent, she finds appalling now) to start
writing. "I had this panicky sensation that it was now or
never."

Joking that she could wallpaper her bathroom with rejections from
magazines for her short stories ("I really could have," she says),
she published her early work in literary journals. One of these
stories, "Past the Island, Drifting," won an O. Henry prize.
Despite this accolade, she quickly learned that one couldn't make a
living writing short fiction. Switching to journalism, Shreve
traveled to Nairobi, Kenya, where she lived for three years,
working as a journalist for an African magazine. One of her novels,
The Last Time They Met, contains
bits and pieces from her time in Africa.

Returning to the United States, Shreve was a writer and editor for
a number of magazines in New York. Later, when she began her
family, she turned to freelancing, publishing in the New York
Times Magazine, New York magazine and dozens of
others. In 1989, she published her first novel, Eden Close. Since then she has written 12 other
novels, among them The Weight of
Water, The Pilot's Wife, The
Last Time They Met, A Wedding in December, and Body Surfing.

In 1998, Shreve received the PEN/L. L. Winship Award and the New
England Book Award for fiction. In 1999, she received a phone call
from Oprah Winfrey, and The Pilot's
Wife became the 25th selection of Oprah's Book Club and an
international bestseller. In April 2002, CBS aired the film version
of The Pilot's Wife, starring Christine Lahti, and in fall
2002, The Weight of Water, starring Elizabeth Hurley and
Sean Penn, was released in movie theaters.

Still in love with the novel form, Shreve writes only in that
genre. "The best analogy I can give to describe writing for me is
daydreaming," she says. "A certain amount of craft is brought to
bear, but the experience feels very dreamlike."

Shreve is married to a man she met when she was 13. She has two
children and three stepchildren, and in the last eight years has
made tuition payments to seven colleges and
universities.

Books by Anita Shreve