Anthony Doerr

Anthony Doerr (born 1973 in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American writer of novels and short stories. He became widely known with All the Light We Cannot See, a novel set in occupied France during the Second World War that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2015 and made him one of the most widely read American authors of his generation. His path to that success was slow, built over more than a decade of stories, memoir and novels.

He grew up in Ohio, where a love of reading was first sparked when his mother read him C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia aloud. He attended a private all-boys school, then studied history at Bowdoin College in Maine and later earned a master's degree at Bowling Green State University. Before and after university he took a range of jobs and travelled widely, to places as varied as Alaska, New Zealand and Kenya, experiences that colour the settings and curiosity of his later work.

His first book was the story collection The Shell Collector, which earned him the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize. He then published the novel About Grace and a memoir about a year in Rome. His prose often pairs careful documentary detail with an interest in nature and history, and he frequently arranges his novels in short sections that move between several characters. Recurring concerns include memory, human fragility, and the uneasy relationship between technology, war and the written word.

In All the Light We Cannot See he followed a blind French girl and a young German soldier through the war. His third novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, braids three distant moments together around a lost ancient text and the idea that stories can hold a community together. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, and his work is often read as a case for literature as a form of attention to others.