Jane Alison was born in 1961 in Canberra, Australia, and until she was eleven grew up in the Australian and U.S. diplomatic services. She went to public schools in Washington, D.C., and studied classics at Princeton and Brown universities and creative writing at Columbia. Before writing fiction, she worked for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Washington City Paper, the Miami New Times, and Tulane University; she has also been a freelance editor and illustrator. Since 2013 she has been a professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia.
Her first novel, The Love-Artist, was published in 2001 and has been translated into seven languages. It was followed by three further novels: The Marriage of the Sea, Natives and Exotics, and a nonfiction novel, Nine Island. She has also published a memoir, The Sisters Antipodes; translations of Ovid’s stories of sexual transformation, Change Me; and Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative. Her new book, inspired by the collision of architects Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier, is VILLA E, due out in August 2024.
She has collaborated with composer Thomas Sleeper on a mini-opera and a song cycle based on her books, and her short fiction and essays have appeared in the Paris Review, New York Times, Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, Boston Globe, Creative Nonfiction, TriQuarterly, Germanic Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Jane Alison on NPR’s “Here and Now”:
Jane Alison on memoir, fiction, and truth (in discussion with UVA students):
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