Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett (born December 2, 1963) is an American author. In 2002 she received the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction for her novel Bel Canto.

Biography Ann Patchett was born December 2, 1963 ) 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. She has described her stepfather as a "very, very weird guy" who had her carry a gun as early as age sixteen, and she partially attributes her disinterest in texting to his forcing her mother to carry a pager and respond to him on demand.

Patchett attended St. Bernard Academy, a private Catholic school for girls in Nashville run by the Sisters of Mercy. After graduation, she attended Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York.

In her late twenties, Patchett won a fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts; In 2016, Parnassus Books expanded, adding a bookmobile expanding the reach of the bookstore in Nashville. Patchett lives in Nashville with her husband, Karl VanDevender.

Writing

Patchett's first published work was in The Paris Review, a story which appeared before she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College. Her second novel Taft won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in fiction in 1994. In 2001, she achieved a breakthrough with her fourth novel Bel Canto, becoming a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist was released in October 2007. What Now?, published in April 2008, is an essay based on a commencement speech she delivered at her alma mater in 2006. She is the editor of the 2006 volume of the anthology series The Best American Short Stories. In 2011, she published State of Wonder, a novel set in the Amazon jungle, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. In 2016 she published the novel Commonwealth to widespread critical acclaim. Patchett called the book her "autobiographical first novel," explaining, “The wonderful thing about publishing this book at 52 is that I know that I am [already] capable of working from a place of deep imagination.”

In 2019, Patchett published her first children's book, Lambslide, and the novel The Dutch House, a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In November 2021, she published These Precious Days, an essay collection. In 2023, Ann Patchett published a novel called Tom Lake, and it made The New York Times Best Seller list.

When asked how to encourage people to slow down and contemplate more during a 2024 interview for the BBC, she responded: Wouldn't it be lovely if people sat quietly for longer periods of time?... I do, because I write novels for a living... I'm very, very careful with myself because I don't want anything to disrupt my ability to concentrate on one thing for long periods of time. To that end, I do not watch television under any circumstances, I do not have a cell phone, and I participate in no form of social media. I have never looked at Facebook. That's kind of interesting, because my bookstore has a huge social media presence and I make videos about the books that I'm reading, but I never watch them.

Her work has been translated into more than 30 languages.

Awards and honors

For specific works Nashville Banner Tennessee Writer of the Year Award, 1994 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize (Taft), 1994 PEN/Faulkner Award (Bel Canto), 2002 Orange Prize (Bel Canto), 2002 BookSense Book of the Year (Bel Canto), 2003 Wellcome Trust Book Prize shortlist (State of Wonder), 2011

For corpus Guggenheim Fellowship, 1995 (mid-career) In 2012, Patchett was recognized on the Time 100 list as one of the most influential people in the world by Time. Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award (body of work), 2014 2014 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement Election to American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2017 Election to American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2020 National Humanities Medal, 2021 Carl Sandburg Literary Award from Chicago Public Library Foundation, 2024 PEN/Audible Literary Service Award, 2026 (announced December 2, 2025) 2026 Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation 2026 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction (announced June 23, 2026)