Bestselling Author │ Novelist │ Essayist To be able to write literature that sells takes an almost surreal amount of stubborn persistence; imagination; the ability to forego distractions, such as vacations, men, alcohol; and a willingness to lock oneself in a room and submit oneself to constant, ruthless self-criticism…But getting there, to that lucky, sacrificial place, requires long, long stretches of unbroken concentration and more Diet Cokes than most people can or want to tolerate. I love the labor, 
the sheer manual labor that goes into making these books seem as though they were effortlessly written. I love what has come to feel like a habit of invention...You see, I love what I do. I raise three human beings, and I do language for a living—it’s only as terrifying as it is lovely. —Kaye Gibbons With domestic book sales of more than 4.2 million copies and numerous worldwide translations, Kaye Gibbons’ writing has been described by Walker Percy as “breathtaking.” Her acclaimed autobiographical, Ellen Foster, is now regarded as a classic and was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 200 Best Novels in English published since 1950. In 1998, her novels,
Ellen Foster and
A Virtuous Woman, were chosen together as Oprah Book Club selections and led
The New York Times bestseller list for many weeks.
Kaye Gibbons was born in 1960 in Nash County, North Carolina on Bend of the River Road. She attended North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying American and English literature. At 26, she wrote her first novel,
Ellen Foster. The book, which drew from some of her personal experiences growing up, won a first fiction award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a Special Citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation.
Praised as an extraordinary debut in 1987, Eudora Welty said that “the honesty of thought and eye and feeling and word” mark the work of this talented writer, and Walker Percy commented, “Ellen Foster is a Southern Holden Caulfield, tougher perhaps, as funny…It’s the real thing. Which is to say: a lovely... sometimes heart-wrenching first novel.”
Now a considered a standard,
Ellen Foster is taught in high schools and universities—often teamed with
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye and
To Kill a Mockingbird. The book has been widely translated, frequently performed in theatres throughout the U.S., and was made into a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie for CBS.
Her second novel published in 1989, the bestselling
A Virtuous Woman, also received wide praise in the U.S. and abroad. The
San Francisco Chronicle called it, “A small masterpiece…[that] Explores the depth and breadth of love with compassion and without sentimentality. We are left both stunned and wiser.”
That year Gibbons received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to write a third novel,
A Cure for Dreams, which was published in 1991 and won the 1990/PEN Revson Award for the best work of fiction published by an American writer under the age of 35 and the Heartland Prize for fiction from the
Chicago Tribune among other awards. In writing this novel, Gibbons was deeply influenced by Federal Writers’ Project transcripts compiled during Great Depression. In them, Gibbons said, she “discovered the voice of ordinary men and women as a pure form of art and force of nature” and realized that these voices would carry her through every novel she writes.
When
Charms for the Easy Life was published in 1993, it became a
New York Times bestseller prompting a
Time magazine reviewer to comment, “Some people might give up their second-born to write as well as Kaye Gibbons.”
Sights Unseen, published in 1995, was also a national bestseller and won the Critics Choice Award from the
Los Angeles Times. The following year Gibbons was the youngest writer ever to receive the Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, a French knighthood recognizing her contribution to French literature.
In 1998, Putnam published her sixth novel
On the Occasion of my Last Afternoon, “a book of saints, sinners, and sorrows offering much pleasure,” said one reviewer. Readers agreed that it was “another cause for accolades” and many regarded it as her most brilliant book to date. This was followed in 2004 by
Diving Women, which is set during the influenza epidemic of 1918.
Most recently, she was invited to become a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a most significant honor. She has received the Oklahoma Homecoming Award and was made a member of the YWCA Academy of Women.
Gibbons is a regular contributor to the
New York Times Book Review and has read and lectured to sold-out audiences from New York City to Seattle. In 2001, she spoke at the Pompidou Center in Paris in what one journalist called, “an act of sustained brilliance.” She is currently working on a new book.
Selected Books - The Lunatics' Ball (forthcoming, Harcourt)
- The Life All Around Me (Harcourt, 2006)
- Divining Women (Putnam, 2004)
- On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon (Putnam, 1998)
- Frost and Flower: My Life with Manic Depression So Far (Wisteria Press, 1995)
- Sights Unseen (Putnam, 1995)
- Charms for the Easy Life (Putnam, 1993)
- A Cure for Dreams (Algonquin Books, 1991)
- A Virtuous Woman (Algonquin Books, 1989)
- Ellen Foster (Algonquin Books, 1987)
To hear an audio interview with Kaye Gibbons about The Life All Around Me from Minnesota Public Radio, click here. To hear an audio interview with Kaye Gibbons from eyeonbooks.com, click here.