Wally Lamb
Biography
Wally Lamb
Wally Lamb
BIO
Wally Lamb’s first two novels, SHE’S COME UNDONE (Simon
& Schuster/Pocket, 1992) and I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE
(HarperCollins/ReganBooks, 1998), were # 1 New York Times
bestsellers, New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and
featured titles of Oprah’s Book Club. I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE was a
Book of the Month Club main selection and the June 1999 featured
selection of the Bertelsman Book Club, the national book club of
Germany. Between them, SHE’S COME UNDONE and
I KNOW THIS MUCH IS
TRUE have been translated into eighteen languages.
Lamb is also the editor of the nonfiction anthologies COULDN’T KEEP IT TO
MYSELF: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters
(HarperCollins/ReganBooks, 2003) and I’LL FLY AWAY
(HarperCollins, 2007), collections of autobiographical essays which
evolved from a writing workshop Lamb facilitates at
Connecticut’s York Correctional Institute, a maximum-security
prison for women. He has served as a Connecticut Department of
Corrections volunteer from 1999 to the present.
Wally Lamb is a Connecticut native who holds Bachelors and Masters
Degrees in teaching from the University of Connecticut and a Master
of Fine Arts in Writing from Vermont College. Lamb was in the ninth
year of his twenty-five-year career as a high school English
teacher at his alma mater, the Norwich Free Academy, when he began
to write fiction in 1981. He has also taught writing at the
University of Connecticut, where he directed the English
Department’s creative writing program.
Wally Lamb has said of his fiction, “Although my
characters’ lives don’t much resemble my own, what we
share is that we are imperfect people seeking to become better
people. I write fiction so that I can move beyond the boundaries
and limitations of my own experiences and better understand the
lives of others. That’s also why I teach. As challenging as
it sometimes is to balance the two vocations, writing and teaching
are, for me, intertwined.”
Honors for Wally Lamb include: the Connecticut Center for the
Book’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the Connecticut Bar
Association’s Distinguished Public Service Award, the Barnes
& Noble Writers for Writers Award, the Connecticut
Governor’s Arts Award, The National Institute of
Business/Apple Computers “Thanks to Teachers” Award.
Lamb has received Distinguished Alumni awards from Vermont College
and the University of Connecticut. He was the 1999 recipient of the
New England Book Award for fiction. I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE won
the Friends of the Library USA Readers’ Choice Award for best
novel of 1998, the result of a national poll, and the Kenneth
Johnson Memorial Book Award, which honored the novel’s
contribution to the anti-stigmatization of mental illness.
SHE’S COME
UNDONE was a 1992 “Top Ten” Book of the Year
selection in People magazine and a finalist for the
Los Angeles Times Book Award for Best First Novel of
1992.
Wally Lamb’s third novel, THE HOUR I FIRST BELIEVED,
explores chaos theory by interfacing several generations of a
fictional Connecticut family with such nonfictional American events
as the Civil War, the Columbine High School shootings of 1999, the
Iraq War, and Hurricane Katrina. The book will be published by
HarperCollins in November of 2008.
Wally and Christine Lamb are the parents of three sons, Jared,
Justin, and Teddy.
Wally Lamb
