Author Bios

William Cuthbert Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, and grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, which would become the model for the fictional Jefferson, county seat of his imaginary Yoknapatawpha County. He came from a family with deep roots in Southern history — his great-grandfather, Colonel William Clark Falkner (the family…

Ann Patchett was born in 1963 in Los Angeles, California, and moved to Nashville, Tennessee, as a child after her parents divorced and her mother remarried. Nashville, the American South, and the particular culture of Catholic schooling that marked her childhood in Tennessee are all present in her work in various forms, alongside the wider…

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of a German-born entomologist and a woman of Austrian descent who taught school. Her father, Otto Plath, died of complications from undiagnosed diabetes when Sylvia was eight, an event she experienced as abandonment and that haunted her imagination for the rest of…

Philip Michael Ondaatje was born on September 12, 1943, in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), into a family of Dutch, Sinhalese, and Tamil descent. His parents separated when he was young, and his childhood was divided between Ceylon and his mother’s eventual home in England. He emigrated to Canada in 1962, completing his undergraduate education…

Barbara Kingsolver was born on April 8, 1955, in Annapolis, Maryland, and grew up in rural Kentucky, an experience of rural poverty and agricultural life that has informed her fiction throughout her career. She studied biology at DePauw University in Indiana, earning her bachelor’s degree in 1977, then completed a master’s degree in ecology and…

Haruki Murakami was born on January 12, 1949, in Kyoto, Japan, the son of two teachers of Japanese literature. He grew up in Kobe, and his childhood reading was predominantly Western: American crime fiction, European literature, and above all the Anglo-American pop music that was flooding Japanese youth culture in the 1960s. He studied theater…

Edith Newbold Jones was born on January 24, 1862, into one of the oldest and wealthiest families in New York City — a family so socially prominent that the expression “keeping up with the Joneses” may have originated as a reference to her relatives. She was educated by governesses and tutors, traveled extensively in Europe,…

Rohinton Mistry was born in 1952 in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, into a Parsi Zoroastrian family—a small religious minority of Persian descent that has played a disproportionately large role in Indian cultural and professional life. He was educated in Bombay before emigrating to Canada in 1975, settling in Toronto where he found work as a…

Gail Honeyman was born in 1972 and grew up in Scotland, where she was educated before earning a degree from the University of Glasgow and a master’s degree from the University of Oxford. She has worked in various roles in local government in Scotland and has remained, by the standards of major literary success, an…

Haruki Murakami was born on January 12, 1949, in Kyoto, Japan, the son of two teachers of Japanese literature. He grew up in Kobe, and his childhood reading was predominantly Western: American crime fiction, European literature, and above all the Anglo-American pop music that was flooding Japanese youth culture in the 1960s. He studied theater…