Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley (born September 26, 1949) is an American novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres. While working toward her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar. From 1981 to 1996 she was a Professor of English at Iowa State University, by Washington Post writer Leslie Morgan Steiner. Her essay "Why Bother?" appears in the anthology Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting, published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2013.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005) is a non-fiction meditation on the history and the nature of the novel, somewhat in the tradition of E. M. Forster's seminal Aspects of the Novel, and roams from eleventh-century Japan's Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji to 21st-century American women's literature.

In 2001, Smiley was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has participated in the annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the Cheltenham Festival, the National Book Festival, the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts and many others. She won the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006, and chaired the judges' panel for the prestigious Man Booker International Prize in 2009.

Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections (2001), considers Smiley's book The Greenlanders to be greatly underappreciated and among the best works of contemporary American fiction.

Smiley then wrote a trilogy of novels about an Iowa family over the course of generations. The first novel of the trilogy, Some Luck, was published in 2014 by Random House. The second volume followed in the spring of 2015 and the third volume in the fall of 2015.

Smiley's A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money, and Luck has been compared to English author Jilly Cooper's 2010 novel Jump!.

Awards Smiley received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. In 2006, she received the Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature, which is given annually in Rockville, Maryland, the city where F. Scott Fitzgerald, his wife Zelda and their daughter Frances are buried, as part of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival.

Works Novels Barn Blind (1980) At Paradise Gate (1981) Duplicate Keys (1984) The Greenlanders (1988) A Thousand Acres (1991) Moo (1995) The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (1998) Horse Heaven (2000) Good Faith (2003) Ten Days in the Hills (2007) Private Life (2010) Some Luck (2014) Early Warning (April, 2015) Golden Age (October 20, 2015) Perestroika in Paris (2020) A Dangerous Business (2022) Lucky (2024) Lidie (2026)

Short story collections The Age of Grief (1987) Ordinary Love & Good Will (1989)

Non-fiction books Catskill Crafts (1988) Charles Dickens (2003) A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money, and Luck (2004) Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005) The Man Who Invented the Computer (2010)

Young adult novels The Georges and the Jewels (2009) A Good Horse (2010) True Blue (2011) Pie in the Sky (2012) Gee Whiz (2013) Riding Lessons (2018) Saddles and Secrets (2019) Taking the Reins (2020)

Children's books Twenty Yawns (2016)