With a fluid and wide-ranging style, bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult has been compared to writers as diverse as Alice Hoffman, John Grisham, and Daphne du Maurier. In some two dozen novels, she examines important social issues that are as thought-provoking as they are divisive. Her fiction nods to many genres, including literary fiction, legal thrillers, psychological portraits, romances, and ghost stories, giving her readers a fresh experience with each book. Picoult has an estimated 40 million books in print. Her last nine novels have debuted at #1 on The New York Times bestseller list, and five of her books have been made into movies.

Picoult’s first novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale, weaves five narrative voices into a story of love, loss, and self-discovery, which Publishers Weekly called a “powerful and affecting novel that demonstrates there are as many truths to a story as there are people to tell it.” Her critically acclaimed third book, Picture Perfect, is the story of an anthropologist trapped in a cycle of domestic abuse with her glamorous movie star husband. Library Journal praised the novel as “an important book from a talented writer we hope to hear from again and again.” In My Sister’s Keeper, Picoult tells the story of a thirteen-year-old, Anna, who was conceived by her parents specifically as a bone-marrow donor for her sister Kate, who has leukemia. The novel focuses on Anna’s search for identity in a life that was predetermined by her genetic ability to help her sister. Kirkus declared that Picoult “vividly evokes the physical and psychic toll a desperately sick child imposes on a family, even a close and loving one.”

“Picoult is a skilled wordsmith, and she beautifully creates situations that not only provoke the mind but touch the flawed souls in all of us.”

—The Boston Globe

Small Great Things, Picoult’s most recent book, explores racism in America through the lens of a tragic incident at a Connecticut hospital. Picoult called it “one of the hardest” books she has written so far. “I really had to explore my own beliefs and my own biases and learn a lot about myself and privileges that I’ve had that I’d never noticed before,” she told People. Small Great Things was another instant New York Times bestseller, and the movie rights were quickly sold: Julia Roberts and Viola Davis have been attached to star.

Picoult’s newest novel, A Spark of Light, out in October 2018, is a powerful and provocative novel about reproductive rights set during a hostage situation at a women’s health clinic. The Star-Tribune called it “a courageous and important work.”

In 2003, Picoult was awarded the New England Bookseller Award for Fiction. She has also received an Alex Award from the Young Adult Library Services Association, the BookBrowse Diamond Award for novel of the year, a lifetime achievement award for mainstream fiction from the Romance Writers of America, Cosmopolitan’s Fun Fearless Fiction Award, Waterstone’s Author of the Year in the UK, a Vermont Green Mountain Book Award, a NH Granite State Book Award, a Virginia Reader’s Choice Award, the Abraham Lincoln Illinois High School Book Award, and a Maryland Black-Eyed Susan Award. Picoult was the 2013-14 recipient of the New Hampshire Literary Award for Outstanding Literary Merit. She received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Dartmouth College in 2010 and another from the University of New Haven in 2012.

She, her husband Tim, and their three children live in Hanover, New Hampshire with two Springer spaniels, two rescue puppies, two donkeys, two geese, ten chickens, a smattering of ducks, and the occasional Holstein.

For more information about Jodi Picoult, please visit jodipicoult.com.