Elizabeth Hand

Born March 29, 1957, the oldest of five children in a large, mostly Irish Catholic clan. Grew up in Yonkers and Pound Ridge, NY, before moving to Washington, D.C. in 1975 to study playwriting and cultural anthropology at Catholic University. Worked for a number of years at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air & Space Museum. In 1988 she moved to a small town on the Maine coast with her former partner, novelist Richard Grant, father of her two teenage children. She continues to live in Maine with her longtime partner, the UK critic John Clute.

Elizabeth describes herself as a visionary writer, with a longstanding interest in outsider artists, the subjects of much of my short fiction as well as my most recent novels, the forthcoming psychological thriller GENERATION LOSS, about an emotionally damaged proto-punk photographer, and 2004’s MORTAL LOVE, inspired by the life and work of the schizophrenic Victorian fairy painter Richard Dadd. She had her own encounter with the numinous in November 1974, when she had an epiphanic vision of a Dionsyian figure she named “the boy in the tree.” Several years later, on St. Patrick’s Day 1978, she was abducted and raped while visiting her boyfriend in Washington, D.C. These two experiences, one of inexplicable transcendence, the other of random human violence, have shaped nearly all of her fiction.

Her novels and short stories are highly autobiographical and draw deeply on the places she has lived and loved most. These include Yonkers (yes, Yonkers!) in particular her grandparents’ sprawling home overlooking the Hudson River, the model for Fairview in my recent short novel ILLYRIA, and Lazyland in GLIMMERING (1997); Pound Ridge (where her father has been the town justice since 1972) and the neighboring small town of Katonah, which became Kamensic Village, a place that is back-or foregrounded in much of her work; Washington, D.C., where she lived for many years, and where the fictional Univertsiy of the Archangels and St. John the Divine (inspired by her alma mater) is located; North London, especially the area surrounding Camden Town; and the rural coast of Maine, where she has lived for the last 19 years and which has been the setting for my most recent work, including GENERATION LOSS and the novellas “Winter’s Wife” and “The Least Trumps.”

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