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’s writing has been described by Walker Percy as “breathtaking.” Her acclaimed autobiographical novel, 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 both chosen as Oprah Book Club selections and led The New York Times bestseller list for several weeks.
 
Kaye Gibbons was born in 1960 in Nash County, North Carolina. She attended North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying English and American. At 26, she wrote her first novel, Ellen Foster. The book, which drew from 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.

Eudora Welty remarked on “the honesty of thought and eye and feeling and word” 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 considered an American classic, 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.

Gibbons's second novel, A Virtuous Woman (1989), 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.”
 
Also in 1989, 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. A Cure for Dreams 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 voices of ordinary men and women as a pure form of art and force of nature." Those voices carry Gibbons through every novel she writes.
 
When the New York Times bestseller Charms for the Easy Life was published in 1993, a Time magazine reviewer quipped, “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, Gibbons published her sixth novel, On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, which one reviewed dubbed "a book of saints, sinners, and sorrows offering much pleasure." 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, Gibbons was invited to become a member of the prestigious Fellowship of Southern Writers. 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)

Media

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.