Donna tartt author biography of suzanne
•
The novels of Donna Tartt ’86, including The Secret History and The Goldfinch—winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—have placed her in the pantheon of American writers.
She began writing The Secret History, a “reverse murder mystery” set in a fictional Vermont College, while at Bennington, alongside her classmates including Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Lethem, and Jill Eisenstadt. The book was on The New York Times best-seller list for 13 weeks.
The Goldfinch appeared in 2014 to much critical acclaim. The Pulitzer Prize jury hailed it as “a beautifully written coming-of-age novel with exquisitely drawn characters..., a book that stimulates the mind and touches the heart.”
In addition to winning the Pulitzer, Tartt also received the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award for The Goldfinch, among many other honors. In 2014, she was named to TIME magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people.
Photograph © B
•
Suzanne White
Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I am American expatriate living in France. I was born and grew up in Buffalo, New York. I have lived in Paris for fifty years.
I have written at least 100 books. Some are “evergreen” books that we can buy and read forever. But each year I write a huge book of monthly Horoscopes for both Chinese and Western signs. I then divide that book into 24 smaller books, add some information about each sign and publish those. So I guess hundreds of books is the right answer.
I am very famous as an astrology author. But now I am shifting to autobiography.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
My newest book is called “2015 New Astrology Horoscopes”. It’s #1 best seller on Amazon’s New Age Horoscopes Best seller list. It has been #1 since mid December 2014. Still, I want to expand the market. The book exists in both e-book and paperback versions.
I am now w
•
Profile: Donna Tartt
Profile by Cameron Elizabeth Williams
By the age of thirteen, Donna Tartt had already begun to establish herself as an emerging literary talent. Born in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1963 and raised in nearby Grenada, Tartt spent her childhood enjoying the company of her great-aunts, great-grandparents, and grandparents. Tartt was especially fond of—and likewise adored by—her great-grandfather. It was he who helped facilitate Tartt’s interest in writers such as Charles Dickens and Thomas De Quincey, authors who would later influence Tartt’s own writing and berättande. It was also he who, as she describes in her memoir “Sleepytown: A Southern Gothic Childhood, with Codeine” (1992), because of what she describes as his “nearly unlimited faith in the power of Pharmacy,” insisted that five-year-old Tartt, sick with tonsillitis, regularly imbibe a cocktail of “blackstrap molasses and some horrible licorice-flavored medicine that was supposed to have vitamins in it