Anita Shreve

ANITA SHREVE began writing fiction while working as a high school teacher. Although one of her first published stories, "Past the Island, Drifting," was awarded an O. Henry Prize in 1975, Shreve felt she couldn't make a living as a fiction writer so she became a journalist. She traveled to Africa, and spent three years in Kenya, writing articles that appeared in magazines such as Quest, US, and Newsweek. Back in the United States, she turned to raising her children and writing freelance articles for magazines. Shreve later expanded two of these articles -- both published in the New York Times Magazine -- into the nonfiction books Remaking Motherhood and Women Together, Women Alone. At the same time Shreve also began working on her first novel, Eden Close. With its publication in 1989, she gave up journalism for writing fiction full time, thrilled, as she says, with "the rush of freedom that I could make it up."

Since Eden Close Anita Shreve has written nine other novels: Strange Fits of Passion, Where or When, Resistance, The Weight of Water, The Pilot’s Wife, Fortune's Rocks, The Last Time They Met, Sea Glass and, most recently All He Ever Wanted. In 1998 Shreve received the PEN/L. L. Winship Award and the New England Book Award for fiction.