Anita Shreve

Born in 1946, Anita Shreve grew up as the daughter of a stay-at-home mom and a Delta Airlines pilot. She first experienced rejection as a writer at the age of ten or eleven, when she submitted poetry to the magazine Jack and Jill. After graduating from Tufts University in 1968, she taught high school English for several years. During this time she started writing short stories, and received an O’Henry Award for “Past the Island, Drifting” in 1975. She left teaching halfway through a school year due to an urge to start writing immediately. Feeling unable to support herself as a writer of fiction, she became a journalist. During the late 1970s Shreve spent several years in Africa writing articles for various magazines. Back in the States, she began a family while she free-lanced, and two articles were later expanded to be published as nonfiction books on women’s issues. At about the same time, her first work of fiction was published in 1989. Today the author divides her time between New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and admits to the passions of writing, knitting, copyediting and architecture.

Shreve describes a common theme in her work as a “sense of passion existing within a framework of restraint.” She also considers infidelity a “gold mine” and frequently incorporates it into her stories. Several of her stories take place in the past, and she enjoys writing in the language of the nineteenth century, which she finds easier to write in, describing it as “more forgiving, more luxurious.”

Architecture, another of Shreve’s interests, also plays a prominent role, with houses sometimes becoming characters in their own right. The vast majority of her stories take place on the East Coast with the sea being a strong force. Yet despite the similarities concerning themes and settings, she considers each of her books to be very different and claims, “I have no desire to recreate.”