Bestselling Author │ Short-story Writer │ Journalist
 
Her editor calls her the “Queen of Quirk.  She has an awful lot of humor and charm, and she’s one of those few writers who writes the way she talks.”  And talks the way she writes, with intelligence, wit and not just a shade of the performer behind her expressive and insightful presentations.

Expansive and armed with a comic’s sense of timing, journalist, novelist and short-story writer Elizabeth Gilbert talks about her writing and her books.   Her most recent is a memoir entitled, Eat, Pray, Love (Viking, 2006), which chronicles the year she spent traveling around the world in search of personal restoration after a difficult divorce.  
 
 

[Eat, Pray, Love] is a wonderful book, brilliant and personal, rich in spiritual insight, filled with sorrow and a great sense of humor. Elizabeth Gilbert is everything you would love in a tour guide, of magical places she has traveled to both deep inside and across the oceans: she's wise, jaunty, human, ethereal, hilarious, heartbreaking, and God, does she play great attention to the things that really matter.
 
—Anne Lamott, novelist and essayist
 
Gilbert’s lecture themes often revolve around the subjects of travel and getting the story “out there…on ranches, in bars, in scary foreign countries, in diners, in rodeos, in strip joints, on fishing boats, in factories and hospitals,” she says.   Gilbert prefers this kind of real-life arena, to “spending a few years in a writing program comparing short stories with a few dozen other young writers trying to find their voices.”
 
Gilbert’s first book, a collection of short-stories entitled Pilgrims (1998), was a New York Times Most Notable Book and won the Ploughshares prize, the “first fiction” awards from The Paris Review and The Southern Review and was a finalist for the PEN-Hemingway Award.  Several stories in the collection were staged at the Water Theater Company at the Tribeca Playhouse.
 
Her first novel Stern Men (2000), a story about Maine lobster fishermen, the women who defy them and entrenched island conflicts, won the Kate Chopin Award in 2001 for creating a female character who goes “beyond the boundaries of cultural expectations to claim a life on her own terms” (Florence Shinkle, St. Louis Post-Dispatch).
 
Hailing from an educated, ascetic rural Connecticut upbringing, Elizabeth Gilbert came to her writing career with fearless reporting skills, an abiding appreciation for working-class values with an attendant skepticism of politically-correct liberalism.  A clear vision of the irony and absurdity in it all informs an easy, at times wicked wit that shuns any ideological or political agendas.
 
After graduating from New York University, she used money earned at a Philadelphia diner to travel, as she says, “to create experiences to write about, gather landscapes and voices.”  She went West to work in diners and bars for the same reason.  Her work for Spin Magazine caught the eye of the editors at Gentlemen’s Quarterly, which proved to be fertile ground for Gilbert, resulting in a run of colorful profiles and stories that eventually turned into books—and movies.
 
Her first article for GQ, “The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon,” chronicled her experience as a waitress at the New York City bar of the same name, and was the basis for the 2000 motion picture Coyote Ugly.  A profile of Hank Williams III in GQ, won the National Magazine Award and was anthologized in Best American Writing 2001.
 
“I think my gift, far beyond whatever gifts that I have as a writer, my gift as a human is that I can make friends with people very quickly, and not in an insincere way,” she tells interviewer Frank Bures at Powell’s Books.  “Everything I learned about being a journalist I learned by being a bartender.  The most exquisite lesson of all is that people will tell you anything.  Want to.   There’s no question you can’t ask if your intention is not hostile.  And it’s not like entrapment; it’s more like a gorgeous revelation.  People want to tell the story that they have.”
 
Nominated for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her nonfiction account of the back-to-basics woodsman, Eustace Conway, in The Last American Man (2002), Gilbert effectively draws on a long-standing intrigue with a luxury-free, pioneer lifestyle.  Taking from intellectualism and pop culture, from seriousness and ribald humor, Elizabeth Gilbert strikes an engagingly subtle, thoughtful and comic balance.
 
A Pushcart Prize winner and National Magazine Award-nominated journalist, she works as writer-at-large for GQ and makes her home in New Jersey.  Gilbert’s journalism has been published in Harper's Bazaar, Spin and The New York Times Magazine.  Her stories have appeared in Esquire, Story, The Paris Review, Ploughshares and The Mississippi Review.
 
Books

• Eat, Pray, Love (Viking, 2006)
• The Last American Man (Viking, 2002)
• Stern Men (Houghton Mifflin, 2000)
• Pilgrims (Houghton Mifflin, 1997)

 
Periodicals

• “Buckle Bunnies,” Spin, 10 (Sept. 1994): 78-82, 154
• “The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon,” GQ, 67 (March 1997): 252-257
• “Eustace Conway Is Not Like Any Man You Know,” GQ, 68 (Feb. 1998): 176-183
• “Chicks with Decks,” GQ, 70 (Aug. 2000): 164-169, 189-191
• “The Ghost,” GQ, 70 (Dec. 2000): 304-311, 346-349
• “My Favorite Martian,” GQ  71 (March 2001): 330-335

Awards & Honors

2002   Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Awards (The Last American Man)
2002   Finalist, National Book Award (The Last American Man)
2002   Library Journal Best Books of the Year (The Last American Man)
1998   Pushcart Prize (Pilgrims)
1998   Best First Fiction Award, Paris Review, The Southern Review & Ploughshares (Pilgrims)

To hear an interview from NPR's Talk of The Nation with Elizabeth Gilbert about Eat Pray Love, click here.

To see Elizabeth Gilbert's presentation at Google, click here.

To see Elizabeth Gilbert in conversation with the Border's Book Club, click here.

To hear an interview from Eye on Books with Elizabeth Gilbert about Eat Pray Love, click here.

To hear an interview from Canadian Broadcasting Corporation with Elizabeth Gilbert about Eat Pray Love, click here.

To hear an interview from NPR with Elizabeth Gilbert about The Last American Man, click here.

For more information about Elizabeth Gilbert and her work, please go to www.elizabethgilbert.com.