Alice Hoffman

Alice Hoffman (born March 16, 1952, in New York City) is an American novelist who also writes for children and young adults. She is associated above all with magic realism, a mode in which the fantastic sits comfortably alongside everyday life. Her name reached a wide audience with Practical Magic, a 1995 novel adapted into a 1998 film.

She was raised on Long Island, in a family with roots in Russian-Jewish immigration through her grandmother. She graduated from Adelphi University and later earned a master's degree in creative writing at Stanford, where she was a Mirrielees Fellow in 1973 and 1974. Her first short story, "At the Drive-In", appeared in the magazine Fiction while she was still a student there. Soon afterwards, the editor Ted Solotaroff asked whether she had a novel, and she began what became Property Of, published in 1977.

Her stories often blend irony, magical elements and unconventional romantic relationships. Among her books, Turtle Moon earned the Hammett Prize, and Practical Magic grew into a series with a prequel. In 2019 she published The World That We Knew, based on the account of a woman who, during the Second World War, lived with non-Jewish families to escape the Nazis. She has also written young-adult novels such as Indigo, and a picture book with her son Wolfe Martin.

She wrote the screenplay for the 1983 film Independence Day. She lives in Boston and, after treatment for breast cancer, helped establish the Hoffman Breast Center at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge. Her legacy lies in the many readers who have found in her stories a way of seeing ordinary life with a touch of strangeness, and in a body of work that moves equally between adult and children's literature.