Judith Thurman

Judith Thurman (born 1946) is an American writer, biographer, and critic. She is the recipient of the 1983 National Book Award for Nonfiction for her biography Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller. Her book Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette was a finalist for the 1999 nonfiction National Book Award. In 2016, she received the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

Thurman is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

Early life In 1967, Thurman graduated from Brandeis University with a bachelor's degree.

Early work Thurman began her literary career as a poet and translator. The Covent Garden Press in London published her first book of poems, Putting My Coat On, in 1972.

In the 1970s, Atheneum Books published I Became Alone, a book of essays on women poets for young people, and a volume of poetry for children, Flashlight, which has been regularly anthologized for more than forty years.

In 1973, Thurman returned to New York after five years in Europe and began to contribute to the newly launched Ms. magazine. among others. Thurman worked at Brooklyn College as an adjunct professor from 1973 to 1975. For the remainder of the 1970s, Thurman had three publications while writing a biography.

Writing career

Biographies In the mid-1970s, Thurman began writing a biography on Isak Dinesen after being convinced by a representative from St. Martin's Press. During her eight-year writing process, Thurman stopped writing her biography after experiencing writer's block and anxiety. After resuming her writing, Thurman's biography, Isak Dinesen: The Life of A Storyteller, was published by St. Martin's Press in 1982. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1983, and served as the basis for Sydney Pollack's 1985 film Out of Africa, on which Thurman served as an associate producer.

Thurman took leave to write a biography titled Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, which was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1999. The book was noted as "effective at setting the morally subversive Colette in the social milieu of early-20th-century Paris." The biography won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for biography and the Salon Book Award for biography.

The New Yorker In 1987, Thurman began contributing to The New Yorker. and was a New York Times Best Book of the Year. Her article "Swann Song", about French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, was published in The Best American Essays of 2003.

Other notable articles for The New Yorker include: "Exposure Time" (2003), "The Roving Eye" (2008), "First Impressions" (2008), "Drawn from Life" (2012), and "The Supreme Contradictions of Simone Weil" (2024).

Thurman is a recipient of the Harold G. Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Order of Arts and Letters, from the French government;

Prizes Won National Book Award for Nonfiction, 1983 Salon Book Award for Biography, 1999 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography, 1999 Harold G. Vursell Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Prose Style Bard College's Mary McCarthy Prize for a Woman Writer's Life Work Rungstedlund Prize from the Royal Danish Academy Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, 2022

Finalist National Book Award for Nonfiction, 1999