Gabrielle Zevin

Gabrielle Zevin’s writing career began at 14 years old when an angry letter to her local newspaper about a Guns ‘n’ Roses concert resulted in a job as a music critic. Over several novels for adults and young people, she has written about female soldiers in Iraq, mafia princesses in a retro-future New York City, teenage girls in the afterlife, talking dogs, amnesiacs, and the difficulties of loving one person over many years.

Gabrielle Zevin’s debut, “Margarettown,” was a selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program. “The Hole We’re In,” was on Entertainment Weekly’s Must List and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Entertainment Weekly wrote, “Every day newspaper articles chronicle families battered by the recession, circling the drain in unemployment and debt or scraping by with minimum-wage jobs. But no novel has truly captured that struggle until now.” Publishers Weekly called the novel, “A Corrections for our recessionary times.”

Her best known young adult novel is “Elsewhere.” “Elsewhere,” an American Library Association Notable Children’s Book, was nominated for a Quill Award and received the Borders Original Voices Award. The book has been translated into over 20 languages. Of “Elsewhere,” the New York Times Book Review wrote, “Every so often a book comes along with a premise so fresh and arresting it seems to exist in a category all its own… Elsewhere, by Gabrielle Zevin, is such a book.”

She is the screenwriter of “Conversations with Other Women” (Helena Bonham Carter, Aaron Eckhart) for which she received an Independent Spirit Award Nomination. In 2009, she and director Hans Canosa adapted her novel “Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac” (ALA Best Books for Young Adults) into the Japanese film,” Dareka ga Watashi ni Kiss wo Shita.” She has also written for the New York Times Book Review and NPR’s “All Things Considered.”

Zevin is a graduate of Harvard University. After many years in New York City, she recently moved to Los Angeles. Her eighth novel, the New York Times Best Seller “The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry,” was published in April 2014 by Algonquin in the US, by Penguin in Canada, and by Little, Brown in the UK (as The Collected Works of A.J. Fikry). It will be published in 25 languages.