Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett (born December 2, 1963) is an American author. She received the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction in the same year, for her novel Bel Canto. Patchett's other novels include The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), Taft (1994), The Magician's Assistant (1997), Run (2007), State of Wonder (2011), Commonwealth (2016), and The Dutch House (2019). The Dutch House was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Ann Patchett was born on December 2, 1963, in Los Angeles, California, to Frank Patchett (a Los Angeles police captain who arrested Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan) and Jeanne Ray (a nurse who later became a novelist). She is the younger of two daughters. Her mother and father divorced when she was young. Her mother remarried, and when Patchett was six years old the family moved to Nashville, Tennessee.Patchett attended St. Bernard Academy, a private Catholic school for girls in Nashville, Tennessee run by the Sisters of Mercy. Following graduation, she attended Sarah Lawrence College.After college, she attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she lived with the memoirist and poet Lucy Grealy. Their time as roommates and their life-long friendship was the subject of her 2004 memoir Truth & Beauty.

In her early twenties Patchett married; however, the marriage lasted only about a year.In her late twenties, Patchett won a fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts; during her time there, she wrote her first novel The Patron Saint of Liars, which was published in 1992.In 2010, she co-founded a bookstore with Karen Hayes, Parnassus Books, in Nashville, Tennessee, which opened in November 2011. In 2016, Parnassus Books expanded, adding a bookmobile to expand the reach of the bookstore in Nashville.Patchett currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband, Karl VanDevender. It is Patchett’s second marriage.