Ann Patchett  Ann Patchett (born December 2, 1963) is an American author. She received the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction in the same year, for her novel "Bel Canto". Patchett's other novels include "The Patron Saint of Liars" (1992), "Taft" (1994), "The Magician's Assistant" (1997), "Run" (2007), "State of Wonder" (2011), "Commonwealth" (2016), and "The Dutch House" (2019). "The Dutch House" was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Patchett was born in Los Angeles, California, to Frank Patchett, a Los Angeles police captain, and Jeanne Ray, a nurse who later became a novelist. She is the younger of two daughters. Frank and Jeanne divorced when she was young, and her mother remarried, moving the family to Nashville, Tennessee when Patchett was six years old. Patchett attended St. Bernard Academy, a private Catholic school for girls in Nashville, Tennessee run by the Sisters of Mercy. Following graduation, she attended Sarah Lawrence College. She later attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she wrote her first novel "The Patron Saint of Liars". In 2010, she co-founded the bookstore Parnassus Books with Karen Hayes and it opened in November 2011. In 2016, Parnassus Books expanded, adding a bookmobile to piggyback on the success of food trucks and expand the reach of the bookstore in Nashville. In 2012, Patchett was on the Time 100 list of most influential people in the world by "TIME" magazine. Patchett currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband, Karl VanDevender. Patchett's first published work was in "The Paris Review", where she published a story before she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College. For nine years, Patchett worked at "Seventeen" magazine, where she wrote primarily non-fiction and the magazine published one of every five articles she wrote. She ended her relationship with the magazine after getting into a dispute with an editor and exclaiming, "I’ll never darken your door again!" Patchett has written for numerous publications, including "The New York Times Magazine", "The Washington Post", "O, The Oprah Magazine", "ELLE", "GQ", "Gourmet", and "Vogue".