Ellen Feldman

Ellen Feldman’s fiction occurs at the juncture between major public events and individual private lives. Her most recent novel, Scottsboro (Norton, 2008), short listed for Great Britain’s Orange Prize and chosen by the Richmond Times-Dispatch as one of the five best novels of the year, returns to a heinous chapter in America’s recent past to dissect why and how individuals of all eras perpetrate, perceive, suffer, battle, and sometimes survive injustice. The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank (Norton, 2005), a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a New York Public Library “New, Old, and Retold” selection, and translated into eight languages, probes the power of memory and the cost of forgetting. Lucy (Norton, 2003), explores the sway of the human heart on the body politic and of political ambition on the human heart, and reveals how life in the public eye has changed in the past half century. Ms. Feldman also writes articles on social history and book reviews for a variety of magazines and newspapers, and has lectured extensively in this country and Germany and England. She will use her Guggenheim Fellowship term to complete a novel about Margaret Sanger and Aimee Semple McPherson, two of the most influential and notorious women of the early twentieth century.

Profile photograph by Laura Mozes.